‘Miss Cassie didn’t say e’er word to me about her trouble,’ she answered. ‘I knowed Miss Cassie only when I see her go by on the pike or see her off on her land. I couldn’t say e’er word for sure about Miss Cassie.’

The morning too was strange and long, for Ellen waked several times to see the sun dimly shining at her window. The pictures of the night stood back and far away, hardly troubling her sleep. Her body was tired and heavy and dull, for a night of watching was strange to her experience. She slept heavily from hour to hour and awakened in the afternoon to sit by the fire in a dazed silence. Henry had told Nellie of the night and now he slept on the bed. After she had milked the cows Ellen looked for her own heifer in the great pasture, for she had not seen the yearling for many days, and now she wanted to see the beast, to rub her neck and claim her again as her own, to enjoy the simple sheen of her rich fur and the pleasure of possession, to touch her warm impersonal being. She thought that there would be rain and her mind clung about the fact of the rain. It would settle down by nightfall and all the frost would go out of the ground. She looked away toward the north country, ignoring the south, wilfully forgetting the cedar trees and the doves and the marsh. The clouds shut out the far hills and many white vapours hung near the earth, dull over the pasture. It was spring.

Overhead the clouds ran near the earth, shutting together with deeper seams of leaden silver. A great change had come in a day for it was spring. On the pasture’s brow, just where the hill rolled up to a smooth faint crest, Jonas came, leading his horse. She let her little cow drift away down toward the feeding ricks and met Jonas as he walked on the slope. He had come to tell her that he was going away.

‘A man named Cornish wants me to put in his crops. It’s away over toward Cornishville, near twenty mile or more maybe. A man came up to me on the street in town today and he says, “Want a good job?”’

Jonas was full of the new enterprise, eager to tell of it, proud of it. ‘It’ll be a job now, to look after everything on big place. A small parcel of cows and a few sheep. All the crops.’

His going, elevated to managing an entire farm, filled her with a rich pride. He would make a journey to a new country, she thought with fervour, and she herself expanded to take in the adventure and the new world and the new way between them.

‘I aim to leave right now,’ he said. ‘I promised to be there afore sunup.’

She hardly realised that she was not going herself. They stood together under the leaden twilight on the brow of the low bare pasture with the land reaching far about them, the cows gliding slowly before the feeding ricks and Ben going from barn to barn. Some crows were flocking over Gowan’s field, stretching in a long mass across the sky’s edge, and now and again came their slow deliberate laughter, ha… ha… ha…, hollow and high-pitched; ha… ha… ha…