The road came down a hill just before it reached the toll house and then turned away toward the south. Horses and vehicles coming from the east were unheard until they were almost at the door, making a great sudden clatter as if travellers were riding into the very walls inside. The sounds fell away slowly from the south road, and thus, if vehicles approached from that direction, the noise came first faint and shallow. The hoofs would beat lightly on the distance and grow nearer under a running crescendo of wheels; the sound would arise to great clatter as it passed the door; then suddenly, like a clap of high thunder, it was gone, swallowed into the hill. Ellen found a delight in the snug dry room into which the rain could not come. She would go through the door with a keen rush of sense and, closing the door behind her, she would look about at the enclosing walls while a quiver of content would sweep over her nerves and gather deep in her mind. Her bed stood along one wall and a small wooden trunk which she had bought from the peddler stood along another. The key of the trunk lay on the shelf before the clock print. Names would play in her mind as she moved about in the tight little room in the midst of a stone-tight land surrounded by steep hills, the people speaking but little and that little in a close hard speech. ‘I wouldn’t know what to be thinking,’ one had said, or another, ‘I think myself he was bragging. He’s a bold one.’ The names, Regina Donahue, Pius Donahue, Pius, Pius, Regina, Old Mrs Wingate, Leo Shuck, Mag Mudd, Kate Bannan, she would say them in mind, thinking nothing. It was a pleasure to lock the chest and slip the key onto the high shelf where it lay out of sight. She felt very young in her delight in the locked chest and the closed door although her shadow was tall on the white wall and her dress was a woman’s dress, brushing the door as she passed. Sometimes in the field she felt the same, when she sang with a loud shout and remembered a little girl she had played with – it seemed only a little while ago – a girl named Fanny B., when she had lived beside a river. Fanny B. could climb any tree in the school yard, clinging with her little bare toes, going always a little higher and singing a song her granny had taught her.