“We got everything fixed, up at Ever Green. The grave and all.”

“Well,” Dan said, “that’s your job.”

“And I got that Bearman boy coming back on the train tonight. We’ll bury him tomorrow morning.”

Bale said, “Adolph Bearman? Coming back…?

“He died after he got hurt in that Chancellor battle. Ain’t nobody told you? His pa is bringing him home from Virginia.” He trotted away down the walk, scooted up over the wheel, and the mare started off before he was fairly in the seat.

Dan stepped from the porch and walked slowly through the side yard near its encompassing fence. The wooden cistern cover was new—bright yellow boards, probably built within the past month or two. The old one had been lichened and rotten-looking and strangely beautiful, even when he last saw it seven years before. He glanced across the fence toward the Knouse home, and a yellow curtain twitched at one of the windows. Old lady Knouse was watching, peering and wondering. “Poor relic,” he thought. “Why does she watch me?”

In the back yard, he sat down on the round bowlders which formed the curb of the nasturtium bed. His house was beautiful in that kind morning sunlight—its green-gray shingles, its walls of powdery brick, its back porch with the morning-glories creeping up taut cotton strings. A great deal, he thought, has happened since I sat here last. There has been a war, and Ike Herriott was killed by the Sioux, and my grandfather must submit to Finis Sketchley’s hands. There are still morning-glories. A new cover for the cistern …

South past privy and deserted stable and woodshed, the lot sloped away, south and west, its tangled rose bushes giving way to a narrow vegetable garden and a longer field of bluegrass. A big sweet-gum tree marked the extremity, where chocolate-colored rails ruled off the Fanning pasture. Then the ground slid rapidly up toward the seminary grounds, and the Fannings’ house in its distant grove, surrounded by sprawling outbuildings. As Dan looked he saw a carriage creep out of the driveway, down the lane, and east in the road from Fairfield.

He thought that Ty was going out for a morning drive. Perhaps he would stop by. Dan hoped that he wouldn’t.

The cupola of the seminary was an egg-shell against the solid, warm blue of the sky. Southeast, under mealy haze, the Round Top hills nosed up. Dan squinted. Yes, they had cut off timber on Round Top. It looked naked and marred … Chickens clucked drowsily, over at Fannings’. A Sunday clucking, though this was Tuesday … Somewhere a cow bawled. There was a placid opulence about this morning; you wished that you might be a vegetating part of the earth; you could smell the honey, the hot bodies of drying grain.