‘I could kill Jonas with a knife,’ she said. ‘Jonas. I’ll kill Jonas. I hate the look of him. I hate him last fall, a-comen every day for a spell.’

An awful strength heaved up in her anger and hate. She jerked her bed before the window with one rough strong gesture and sat looking out into the dusk. Beyond the window there was nothing. Lines of fields were nothing and sky was nothing, less than foolishness. Strength pushed at her arms, unmeasured strength, closing her hand over a knife handle, and a great sickness arose in her abdomen and spread into her breast. There was nothing left but kill, kill, kill… Jonas bringing her the frost flowers gathered from MacMurtrie’s field and the last goldenrod. Jonas bringing her the biggest hickory nut. Jonas telling her how many shocks he had cut that day, and telling her when old Mr Chandler paid him off in the stripping room and called him trifling before all the other men and told him to get out. He almost cried when he told her. And then she was holding his head against her breast as they sat on the cabin step in the early cold, and telling him he was not trifling and that he would find another place… His words, ‘Me and you, Elleen. Before summer, Elleen…’ A great sickness came to her breast. She hated the white about his mouth and she hated his limping foot. She would despise him. She would strangle him with her hand, and a great strength came to her that made her hands tremble under their grip. Then words that were printed into her memory long ago began to run forward, and this hour lost its identity before the force of another, long past, until she swam back into the past as if she were an apparition, without presence of its own. The voices spoke aloud, voices of men, filling the room with their terror, speaking sharply, speaking with authority or fright.

‘…how to get ’er down…’

‘Cut the rope…’

‘No, don’t cut no rope. She might be still a-liven.’

‘Bring up that lamp, Ellen.’

One lamp, now, carried to the top of the hall. The stairs came up out of a dark hole and a long woman was hanging down into the hole, going down into the black.

She was running again through the night in a cold dark, slipping on the ice where it dipped down into the marsh place. The farm bell was ringing loud on MacMurtrie’s hill and the hounds were baying and running in the fields and woods, the yelping of the hounds flowing up and down and lying under the quick steady beat of the farm bell. One light shone out from MacMurtrie’s, from the hall door which was standing open. She was running up into the yard just as the woman came away from the bell rope, walking in uneven steps, her shoulder rising and falling with the limp. Then the light was coming out of the open door, falling on the lame woman and on herself, there present now, in the frost. Mr Al was running up the drive on a horse and coming into the light, and then Henry came out of the dark, the path she had come. The men were going up the stairs in the hall. The woman on the stone door-sill was moaning, ‘Miss Cassie, child…’