‘Tim talks to Sallie Lou. That’s a case for sure.’ Jonas’s voice.

‘She’s a pretty girl.’ Ellen heard her own words again.

‘Who? That! Naw, not much! I know one that’s prettier.’

They were sitting on the floor eating the custard and cake. ‘Saw old Sallie Lou a-cryen the night she joined,’ one said.

Ellen still kept the note against her body. It was folded into a little square of clean white cloth. While she walked slowly up and down the tobacco rows she could feel it push against her flesh, could feel it anew each time she bent over the hoe. One afternoon Dorine came; they sat on the porch just outside the kitchen, Nellie, Dorine and Ellen. Ellen had put on a colourless dress, the dress of the summer before washed clean and sweet, crisply ironed, and she had tied a small blue ribbon about her throat as the other girls were using. Dorine talked about her turkeys which she was raising with a chicken hen. She was afraid to stay alone in the house and sometimes she went to the field where Elmer was at work and sat in a fence corner or under a tree, but she became lonesome doing that. She had canned some cherries. She came back again and again to the turkeys and their hen mother, to the cherries, to what Elmer liked to eat. She seemed very well contented although her hair was not so glossy as it had formerly been, as if it were untended. Ellen went away to get some corn to shell for the hens and while she was gone Dorine and Nellie talked, their voices running into low confidences and they seemed both to be talking at once, but when she came back they were still until Dorine asked some idle question about the corn. She had some bit of news of Rosie, and then came back to the cherries again. Ellen shelled the corn and went away to feed the hens, and while she was gone she heard the low eager purring of voices. ‘Ellen don’t know,’ she heard Dorine say when she came near the porch again.