Called from her brief sleep, Ellen milked the cows and brought the wood for the cooking fire. After she had eaten she went away slowly across the ploughed field toward the hill where the plant beds were set in the spring. The physical weariness which had followed the long walk had taken possession of her grief, and her thought was numbed, but the hills would ask her no questions, and a vague sense visited her that later she would know what to do. Now she must go from the cabin. Up in the hill where the MacMurtries had hunted the foxes she sat under the shade of some interlocking trees, and, as she sat among dry leaves looking down upon the hill of the plant beds where the cleared spots showed among the thick growth as rectangular patches, a faint dying wind seemed to blow over her and a faint phrase blow with it, dimly sensed with the fanning of the wind, ‘In the time of man, in the time of man.’

She eased herself among the dry leaves, her folded arm for a pillow, and soon fell asleep although these winds blew over her laden with faint phrases and were all but lost, coming now and then into the confusion of a dream. She lay there all the day, falling out of her deep sleep into a hurt dream now and then but gathering back into nothingness and numbness in the end. The hot sun of the midday did not trouble this high glade, and into her sleep came a sense that she had been flung to some high and remote place from which she could look down upon the time of man, the world, squares and rectangles cut upon a virgin hill, and pity it with a great grief which she would assume all in her season.

Toward evening, waking, she saw the slanting rays of the sun and her habit somehow knew or sensed its duty toward the turkeys so that she arose at once and came back to the farm where she went stiffly through her task, knowing dimly what she did. She was walking across the pasture calling the hens, but when next she was aware she was carrying water from the old well, stepping through tangled masses of morning-glories that had overrun her path. As she awakened from her stupor of sleep a sense of her loss grew each moment more acute, and a sense of some act impending.