They passed a wide road on which there were frequent travellers, drifting with this a short way along a valley beside a creek. When they left the great road they turned to the south and passed along a soft clay road that lifted up among rougher hills. The cow’s feet made little two-toed tracks in the clay and her footfalls sounded less sharp. Henry stopped frequently to let Ellen rest, or he would offer to drive the cow and let her take his place on the wagon, but the beast knew Ellen’s guidance best, and the journey soon moved forward as before, the wagon far ahead and dimly seen up a long vista or lost around a curve, but still the forward-drawing force, and she walked quietly on, bound in the immediate certainty of herself alive and of the little cow moving evenly before her.

They went by scattered farms, taking hill after hill and winding about along valleys, rising always a little higher. There was much uncultivated land grown over with brush that was now leafless, the colour of these patches red and brown because of the December twigs and buds. A long hill lifted slowly from rise to rise, so gently that the cow scarcely slackened her gait, and Ellen came evenly after, her hand now and then resting on the animal’s back and herself rising and falling with the movements of the beast. Near the top of a hill Ellen lifted her eyes and, rising out of the near-lying road, far away against the sky, rolled a great land, space after space and hill floating after hill to the south where a chain of low mountains hung embedded in the mesh of the air. A few steps further and the whole landscape had lifted, a far rolling land but little marked by farms for there were few houses visible, although here and there the cleared places were green with winter wheat. The mountains grew more definite as she looked back to them, their shapes coming upon her mind as shapes dimly remembered and recognised, as contours burnt forever or carved forever into memory, into all memory. With the first recognition of their fixity came a faint recognition of those structures which seemed everlasting and undiminished within herself, recurring memories, feelings, responses, wonder, worship, all gathered into one final inner motion which might have been called spirit; this gathered with another, an acquired structure, fashioned out of her experience of the past years, out of her passions and the marks put upon her by the passions of others, this structure built up now to its high maturity. There was no name to come to her lips in this moment of faint recognition, a moment which dispersed itself in an emotion, for the word Jonas had been denied her, had been subtracted from the emotion it had caused and signified and with which it had been made one for many reasons. She stood very still on the top of the rise, the heifer standing beside her and biting at the low dry herbs.