If there’d been a church in town, she might have gone to the priest. A priest, she thought, might be an easy person to tell; but even there, she wasn’t sure what a priest would say on such a matter. What if he just told her to go back home and pray? Would she be able to tell him that she’d tried that already? That every night for more than half a year she’d lain in bed and prayed till she was blue in the face and it hadn’t worked? Anyway it was a waste of time to think about a priest because there wasn’t a church for a hundred miles. It was a godless place they’d come to. Godless and friendless and only Henry Fowler’s wizened walnut face at her window at nine o’clock in the morning, poking his nose into her private business.

Well she would not sink under it. No she wouldn’t. She’d experienced other setbacks in her life, other disappointments and shocks of one sort or another. It would be the same with this one, she would endure it like anything else, and wasn’t it true anyway, that in time all things passed? This would too. There was a remedy, in the end, for everything. She just had to find it.

When she and Fowler were inside she told him that Tom had gone into town for salt and oil and needles and wouldn’t be back till nightfall. Fowler nodded and asked if he might tip the water from his hat into her bucket of soapy water.

‘Of course,’ she said – cold, prim, barely polite.

She invited him to sit, and said she would boil the water for some tea.

At the stove she busied herself with the kettle, wondering what he wanted, why he’d come. She wondered if he was going to sit there and look at her in that way of his that made her want to get up and go somewhere away from him, into a different room, behind a door or a wall or a screen, so he couldn’t do it. Somehow it made everything worse, being looked at, especially by someone like Henry Fowler. She’d rarely seen any one who looked as seedy as he did. She wondered if he’d been a convict.