“I haven’t finished the biscuits yet,” Rosalie says.

“I can finish them.” Mother’s words are clipped and clear. At first she’d pretended Rosalie’s fearfulness would pass. When it didn’t, she’d tried to coax Rosalie out of it. “You used to love to play outside,” she’d say and, it’s quite true, Rosalie did. She used to love to play outside with Henry Byron.

She remembers wandering all over the farm, sometimes with other children, sometimes alone—into the dairy, the cider press, the barn, the murk of the forest, the edge of the marsh. She’d walked on paths her father told her the Algonquin Indians had made, and brought home arrowheads and tomahawks. She remembers these things with equal parts loss and alarm. How happy she’d been, that wild child. How innocent.

How careless. How defenseless.

Her coaxing having made no difference, Mother now turns stern. This nonsense has gone on long enough. She gets Rosalie’s bonnet from the wall peg, pulls it on over Rosalie’s braids. She ties it, perhaps too tightly. She stands at the door until Rosalie goes through it.

Rosalie looses the dogs. It excites them almost past their endurance to be freed. There are two of them now, Veto and Rolla, the gentler offspring of the original savages, a trio who used to slip the property in order to rip out the throats of the neighbors’ pigs, so that Father was forced to buy the bodies and, much to his horror, let them be eaten.

Veto and Rolla race first to the cabin, where Asia has continued to carry on and they are anxious to discover who would torment a child so. After that, they scatter and Rosalie has to call them back. They return, leap about her, the barking and Asia’s crying both rising in pitch and volume and still Rosalie can hear her own heartbeat, banging away in her ears. She dislikes loud noises. They make her head ache.

She unties her bonnet, but it doesn’t help. The gate is a quarter mile away. Mother is in the doorway, watching. “The mail won’t walk itself here,” she says, unkindly since it could easily walk here with June. When Rosalie returns, if Rosalie returns, Mother may wish she hadn’t been in such a hurry for Father’s letter. One never knows about Father’s letters.

Rosalie takes a heavy step, and then another, and then another. The dogs pad along beside her, quietly now, but Rosalie can hear them panting, and she forces herself to concentrate on all the things she can hear, tease them apart: the four-note stream where they swim, a six-note mockingbird in the woods, a far-off woodpecker drumming for insects, the wind shuffling new leaves. Her staccato heart, beating, beating, beating.

She makes it past the beeches and out into the open. She tilts her head back, and the great blue wheels above her, a dizziness so empty she feels it sucking her straight up into the sky. There is so much noise. The world is shrieking and spinning around her.