Thursday she made new nests for the hens, using fresh straw, and leaning over the drinking pans where the last of the ice was delaying in a pan-shaped mass which she threw out to the sun, she thought of Miss Cassie, quick among her hens. She thought of Miss Cassie’s wide brow and her heavy hair and her eyes, and with the thought a stillness seemed to settle over the air. The chickens came out into the sun and ate their corn, moving quickly as if the winter were forgotten, and later one cackled noisily in the henhouse doorway. It was already spring. Any day she might find the blue flowers and the white ones on the hillside. Within a week perhaps the yellow March lilies would be showing spears of green above the ground in Miss Tod’s garden. She would see them if she looked over the fence from the calf lot. Her bright dress would freshen and Jonas would remember that he had said that it became her well, and his arm about her would lie along the flowers and they would be gathered into her flesh and pressed back into her being. Sitting by the slow afternoon fire her emotion gathered again into a reflection. She had taken his shame and had taken his pang as in part hers to trouble, and she had felt her loss, but it was time now to put it by, to make no matter of it. Jonas would come and they would be as if no interval had ever stood between them, as they had been during their last hour.

On that night it was that Miss Cassie MacMurtrie hanged herself. Ellen, when she had been asleep but a little while, heard the MacMurtrie farm bell ringing an alarm and in a moment the Gowan hounds began to bay. Henry said that he had better go, that MacMurtrie’s house was probably burning, and Ellen dressed quickly and started away with him, leaving him behind before they reached the sheep pasture beyond the marsh. The bell continued to ring out some terror from the house which stood dark among the dark trees without flame or light except for the one lamp which stood on the doorsill. When Ellen ran up to the door an old negress who had been ringing the bell dropped the rope and limped across the yard, wringing her hands. She told her broken, fearful story, the words gathered into her cries. Miss Cassie was hanging dead up in the upper hall. She had wondered why Miss Cassie did not come to eat her supper and she had warmed the food over and over and once she had called up the back stair. Amanda Cain and Scott MacMurtrie were gone. Then one of the hounds had begun to moan, had gone wandering through the house whimpering and the other hounds in the stable had taken up the cries. Then she had set a light in the hall.