Midmorning Abby baked the bread which they ate with beans at noontime, still with Leah gone. The bread was without salt, lacking savor and texture, tasting not so much of flour as nothing at all. Without speaking of it, after the meal Abby took the remaining bread to the yards and broke it apart for the hens and returned to the kitchen to turn up a fresh sponge. Pru hitched a single sorrel to the high-wheeled cart and took Jamie to town for ice-cream sodas. Norman sat in the parlor a brief time, his stomach rumbling from the rough lunch. His pipe held no pleasure. After a time he went out and stood in the yard, surveying the hillside for movement. Beyond the small flock of sheep there was nothing. He went into the house again, to the scarred rolltop long since forgotten to have been his father’s and sat to his accounts and after a time the afternoon fell before the trickle of pencil markings into columns. In the kitchen Abby roasted a chicken for dinner, also halved squash, baked onions, the last of the tough old snap beans boiled down with salt pork as her mother made them and also turned out a pie from the select first few ripe Pound-sweets. After a while Pru and Jamie came back from the village and Norman rose and did the chores, Pru joining him after changing clothes. They did not speak. She went on to the house ahead of him with the baskets of eggs. He stood a long while in the blue dusk, running his eyes up the hillside, trying to recall just where her track had broken through the frost that morning. There was no sign of her. He thought to go up after her but knew she could be anywhere, knew also she would scorn him should he chance onto her. She was out where she wanted to be. He recalled how she’d rambled odd hours and days when they seemed cornered to be childless. He went to the house and sat to Sunday dinner with his children. The bread was rich, the chicken fell from its bones. Jamie was restless but someway that afternoon Prudence had impressed him and he made no complaint, did not call out for his mother. Perhaps he was simply sated, tired, content. Norman did not know. Then the meal was done with and the girls worked fast to clear the table and take the boy up, leaving Norman alone to smoke his pipe. And wait his wife. He woke from dozing at the table sometime before midnight to scrub his face with the fading warm water from the reservoir and went out into the moonlight to scan the hills again and smoke once more. There was nothing to be seen. Scant high thin clouds. A halo around the moon. He wanted to call her name. He tapped out the pipe bowl into the air and watched the embers flare toward the ground and die. Heard their faint hiss against the frost already down. His stomach wrenched, torn, as if the midday beans worked their way back up. There was nothing he could do. Finally, he knew he was not a man to trust anything to return to how it had been. He went up to bed and lay there cold and sleepless. Still, she woke him when she came in before dawn, woke him with the chill of her backside pressed into him. He did not speak. He knew she knew he was awake. She did not speak either.