Out behind the kitchen Cybo jingled up, panting like a fool. “Go away,” she whispered, “lie down, lie down.” A night wind made its eerie trickling in the big ash tree. And ridges and hills all around, good people sleeping, young boys up at the school dreaming of war; out in this field one man is walking about. No, she said, I’m utterly damned, but I will be happy, I will be eager and receptive for once in my stupid life.

She crept between the hard rails of the fence. If she had not looked through the window and seen the flame of that match … a powder train leading to all passion and all wish to be possessed. He knew that she was watching from her high purgatory.

Twice in her life, she had seen him. She wanted to shriek and tell the whole audience of nature that she was not responsible, this was none of her doing … The grass reached up, feathery and without any dew, and stroked her legs.

Her feet found a path which twisted among the bowlders and hummocks; she went like a cloud. There was no past or future. Her tongue crept out and laced over her lips, and then they seemed glued together tighter than ever before. In this quarter-light close to the ground, lived shadows and bushes and half-buried rocks which were blue with lichens in the daytime, and Irene Fanning was a moving part of them all; they owned her, they held a shroud around the way she went.

Near those thorn bushes … low, marshy place. That was where he lay, where he stayed all night, the tryst he had named for her. This is my whole life, she thought: I’ve got it here in my hand like a bird, and slowly and deliberately I am crushing it—driving the thin little bones into the frail skin, the downy feathers. Juice of my life, it drips between my fingers.

A thorn frond dragged its needles over her bare forearm. Cruel and eager, it sprang upon her. Voices. Two men were talking—he isn’t alone—two of them—

She sank down on her knees. She lifted the scratched arm to her mouth and moistened it. The sundered nerve ached against her wet lips with steady vibration.

“No,” a man said, “it’s correct. McKosh is positive. That’s the reason I came over to tell you. He had word from Harrisburg.”

Dan Bale. “I think they’re getting all het up over nothing.”

There was the sound of a heavy shoe kicking the turf.

The other man laughed. His voice was exultant. “They’re going to organize a full-sized army—maybe two. This region will be in the Army of the Susquehanna. Major-General D. N. Couch will command it.”