The night seemed very long to Ellen. The spacious house widely set and high roofed, after her cabin homes, seemed to float in a mythical air. From the moment when she first mounted the great mythical stair, carrying the lamp for Mr Al, all through the time that was spent in trying to revive Miss Cassie, all through the warmer rainy dawn when the chilled rooms were colder than the outside air, she had moved through great spaces, going up and down for Miss Tod, who came at daybreak and set the house in order, or she carried messages from the lame negress to the upper floors or sat stiffly in a chair to answer the questions of the coroner. ‘Hold up your right hand and take the oath,’ he had said, and the large room quivered and the walls receded, the great black bed rolling back into ultra spaces. On the wall there was a picture of Scott MacMurtrie, a young likeness, a stiff coat on his shoulders, a smooth roundness on his cheeks. Scott’s collar and tie hung over the back of a chair. Squire Dorsey came into the room and sat in a chair beside Henry. The coroner was a large blond man with little red lines on his cheeks, a troubled man. ‘Do you solemnly swear that the evidence you are about to give shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God?’ he said to her, and she trembled before the solemn words and before the kindness of the voice that uttered them. ‘You can sit down,’ he said, ‘no need to stand.’ She could see Miss Cassie’s dress hanging in the opened closet; Miss Cassie still lay as Henry and Mr Al had first placed her in the hall, covered now with a sheet. ‘Tell all you know of this,’ said the coroner. She had heard the bell, she had run through the dark, running ahead of Henry. The old lame woman had met her in the yard, had limped away from the bell post, Aunt Julie was her name. Aunt Julie had stood outside the house door on the stones before the steps while she went a little way into the hall. She was herself the first one of those outside the household to enter the house, the coroner said, and she acquiesced. When did Henry Chesser and Al Wakefield come? They were just behind her when she stood in the hallway and they went ahead of her up the stair. Did she know anything of the whereabouts of Scott MacMurtrie? When did she see him last? Did she know any reason Cassie MacMurtrie might have for hanging herself?

She tried to go into the stillness of Miss Cassie for reasons, to probe for reasons, Miss Cassie being everywhere present in the room, in the closet, in the air, in the furniture, everywhere about but still now. Miss Cassie had seen Amanda Cain walking before her with bright looks and a bent mouth, looking backward for two years she had seen, all in one look perhaps. Deceiving Miss Cassie before her eyes for two years, but would that, she asked herself, be the reason for the end of a life? Jonas enveloped her mind stirring in the furthest corners of her being and she could not think why one would quit life. A great will to live surged up in her, including the entire assembly – the coroner, Squire Dorsey, Henry, Miss Tod, Mr Al, all of them. They would all live. She was living. Only life was comprehensible and actual, present. She was herself life. It went with her wherever she went, holding its abode in her being. She was alive, she was alive. The coroner waited for her answer.