Ellen was sick for several days, unable to go to the field or the milking pen for her throat was swollen and her skin fevered and dry. Then Henry began to talk of going to another place, saying that he thought he would make a change before spring, fearing, as he said, that he had been at Wakefield’s long enough, he not wanting to take root anywhere. He dropped hints of his intentions as the summer was passing.

‘You’re well enough off here,’ Nellie said. ‘You better stay one place awhile.’

Returning from the tobacco field one evening Ellen knew by some disorder of the chairs in the cabin room and by some faint odour there, that Dorine had been to see Nellie. And while her mother prepared the supper, although she did not speak, from her hostile movements and rough gestures Ellen knew that Dorine had told her of Jonas and Sallie Lou. Ellen went to the table fearfully, but Nellie was quiet, eating little food as if she were sickened, and she spoke but once, to Henry, rebuking him with great bitterness for some slight comment upon the bread which he enacted by rejecting a burnt piece. She pushed aside her uneaten serving and stared at the lamp light. Afterward when Ellen helped her to gather up the dishes she spoke, her voice trailing half away under some enforced discipline.

‘At the store, what kind of goods has he got for fall? I aim for you to have a new fall dress if you are minded. A plaid would be pretty for fall, I always think. A worsted or some kind of wool goods, I’d get you, high price is no matter.’

‘I’ll ride over some day to see,’ Ellen said, ‘or you could go yourself.’ She cared nothing for the dress, cared only to help Nellie pass the bitter moment.

Henry had already begun to search for another place and Ellen dug the potatoes and put them into sacks ready for hauling, two full sacks. Then Miss Tod gave her three geese, two females and a gander. The stripping of the tobacco was hurried so that Henry would be free to go, and all through November this work went forward, John Bradshaw lending a hand, or Mary his wife, or even Mr Al Wakefield. Ellen wore her hair drawn tight or let it hang in a braid, the high coils neglected. She would sit listlessly in her dark dress, her throat unribboned, or she would set herself to the tobacco and work until twilight when the leaves were scarcely visible in the dark stripping room. She would feel the gloom of the barn and of her dingy dress and the limp weariness of the tobacco, and if she continued to move in life it was as if she were some vague memory in some careless mind. She hated Jonas now as being unfit for her regret, as feeble, in him a blending of weakness and appealing friendliness which he had in part and which she had lent him. But working in the stripping room she would often listen for his step in the outer barn, for his voice there joking the men, coming nearer to her, or inside the cabin she would imagine she heard his voice calling to her from the pasture road, herself ready to go, listening intently for confirmation of her wish. Under this confusion she sank as under the dirt of the grave, and thus she sat endlessly stripping the leaves from the tobacco stems, but in her dreams in the night she often arose to a great quiet beauty. There a deep sense of eternal and changeless well-being suffused the dark, a great quiet structure reported of itself, and sometimes out of this wide edifice, harmonious and many-winged, floating back into blessed vapours, released from all need or obligation to visible form, a sweet quiet voice would arise, leisured and backward-floating, saying with all finality, ‘Here I am.’