‘Go on,’ said Milly, ‘give him another, hot day now,’ and Alice had another gulp.

Marion succeeded in not spilling any on the corn sack. She picked up the wheelbarrow handles and Milly heaved the yoke up to her shoulders, splashing her feet as the buckets shook.

‘Alice, wave goodbye to Milly,’ Marion said.

‘No,’ said Alice, and Milly made a face expressing even greater disgust, if that were possible, and they parted.

How distasteful was Milly’s peevish conversation. Marion recalled how she always had to summon her courage and to arrange her cheerfulness to combat Milly’s dreariness. Milly made misery around her and today Marion had not the spirit to ward off Milly’s contagion. Marion walked slowly over the Green, the weight of the wheelbarrow handles pulling on her arms, and the weight of Hilda’s grief and Milly’s poison weighing down her heart.

She trudged on along the stream’s edge, until, round a curve in the stream, the path forked. The left fork went up to the level of the millpond and the top doorway of the Mill, and the right fork went down over the broad cart-bridge above the lower sluice into the Mill yard.

Just by the bridge Marion put down the wheelbarrow handles again to ease her shoulders. At her feet, half embedded in the path was a kidney-shaped stone, whitish with yellow flecks, still there, as it had been all her childhood. She paused to relish the awareness of how she had changed and the stone was unchanged. She crossed the bridge and went into the Mill yard, passing a row of apple trees on her left along the lower sluice, with several grey geese and their goslings pecking about in the bright grass. There was the neat garden on her right, the Mill and the house before her, all so familiar that she could hardly see them as they were. But today, perhaps because of the shock of Dick’s death, all her sensations had a great poignancy. She realized how solid, tall and substantial were the buildings before her. The beams of which the Mill was constructed were twice the girth of those of her own house, thicker even than the great posts and rafters of the Hall. Even the Hall had only one room, whereas the Mill had three rooms, one above the other, strong floors in between them with ladders going up through square holes in the corners of the ceilings, and the Mill’s door was like a barn door, wide and high enough for a laden cart to be backed in. The house, which abutted on to the Mill, and where Marion had been born, was equally strongly built, and, though not as tall as the Mill itself, was high enough to have a half-loft inside approached by a ladder, where the family slept. Both buildings were covered with solid horizontal planks of wood pegged on to the close-set uprights – almost windproof.

The ground in the yard was all dried ruts from wheels, sunken crescents from horses’ hooves, all hard and uneven and very nasty to walk on or to push a wheelbarrow over. No one was about in the yard. Some hens wandered in and out of the Mill, idly pecking at the pale ground, and by the wood pile against the house, a tabby cat lay sleeping in the sun.