She tried to be aware of the dark, to free herself of the spectres, to push aside the old event and disentangle her own, to govern her own. She left the bed and sat on the floor before the window, placing her arms slowly along the narrow sill. She would go back very slowly and firmly and be what she was before. The return, she reflected, would come if she would be quiet. She would go after the turkeys and cut the wood and gather the beans and milk the cows, always looking for something that had not yet come, and be glad if a stranger passed and wonder who this one was and who that. She would go to bed thinking about a vague after-a-while or she would gather the blackberries for Miss Tod and be thinking that the money she would get would help buy her winter shoes. She would make her breath come quietly in and out, for she was still herself, Ellen Chesser.

‘I’m Ellen Chesser. And I’m here, in myself,’ she said. She turned her mind upon some happenings of her infancy. She had lived in a house under nut trees. The rinds of the nuts broke off in beautiful smooth segments and inside was the pale yellow hickory nut to be laid away to dry for the winter. One day she got a fish bone in her throat and Henry carried her a long way down the road, so far that she fell asleep in his arms as he walked. Then she was awake, in some strange house, and there a woman took out the bone with a bright tool.

She arose from the floor and sat on the bed again, flinging down hard. She could never be the same, could never go back. What had some withered, ancient past, tenderly remembered but dry, flat, apart, to do with this life she had now? Let it get out. Let it go. She could never be the same as before. Jonas had been in her thought too long so that her very breath had grown up around him. He was even then tearing a pain through her breast. She saw even more vividly the face on the floor, two men leaning over it, one preparing it for life and the other for death; and then the coroner, ‘Yes, she tied the rope herself, that’s plain,’ and to herself, sworn to speak the truth, ‘Do you know any reason why Cassie MacMurtrie would hang herself?’ Every human relation faded out and every physical tie. Up was no more than down and out undistinguished from in. Friends and possessions and relatives were gone, and hunger and need. She was leaning over Miss Cassie as she lay on the floor – Ellen and Miss Cassie and no other. She leaned over the dead face until she was merged with its likeness, looking into the bulging eyes, the blackened mouth, and the fallen jaw. She went down the stairs and out the door of the house, walking slowly, standing a little while in her tracks, going on. In her eyes, in the very core of her vision, was still the face. She was still merged with the face. Once she stopped by the pond and once she waited awhile by the mule barn. She wandered over the rise of the pasture hill; there was a turmoil in the fog of the earth, in the dew of the soil, in the sweat of the planet. Her feet wandered to the old barn and over into the edge of the marsh. Her tracks were seen the next day along the edge of the tobacco field and up the rise toward the old plant bed where the stone piles stood in the brambles.