Regina had tired colourless eyes of some dark sort, slightly out of focus. Ellen saw her moving evenly down the yard, taking the angry hen from her mother, saw her going up and down the field, fitting her every act to her monotonous passing. Susie Whelen’s wide mouth broke easily into smiles and her good-natured oaths flowed as easily: ‘Before Hell! I never seen such a boy for kissing as you are, Pius Donahue.’ Martin Stigall lifted his hat when he passed along the road before the church. Sometimes if Bell had no eggs to take to the store she would take two from Nellie’s basket that was hidden under the bed. She would hide them under her apron and slip dreamily out at the door when the talk lagged. ‘Bell taken two eggs,’ Ellen would say, without anger, and the basket remained in the same place. ‘She likes a little sweet,’ Nellie would say. The tower of St Lucy stood up out of the hills, the crosses standing evenly, as fragile as air, stone turned fine and thin. From the hill above the quarry there was only the top of the tower to see, but near at hand the whole tower sloped downward like a delicately formed crystal of stone. Ellen had gone there one Sunday afternoon with Pius and Regina and Susie Whelen. A Dominican in a creamy white gown had come out of the door, his shawl collar blowing up in the wind and his long pair of beads clicking against his skirt as he walked, his shoes seeming large and heavy under the flowing white of his robe. One day, passing the toll house, Jasper Kent turned back and stopped a moment, speaking to Ellen, who was alone on the porch. ‘A little money I wish you would lay by for me. I got no safe place to keep e’er thing.’ She had taken the bills from his hand before she knew what he wished, had let him thrust them into her palm and close her hand over them. The sum, eight dollars, seemed very large as she counted the bills over. She put them into her locked trunk and laid the key safely on its shelf.

The bell at St Lucy rang often during the day, for the Brothers were always busy, and when it rang they changed from one way of being busy to another. Ellen learned to relate the ringing of the bell to the shadows and thus to tell the time. When the mid-morning bell came she must leave the field and start toward the house to help finish the cooking. The late bell of the afternoon belonged with the milking and the time of feeding the hogs and geese and horses. The chickens would be plucking at the littered yard for the last of their corn and the little pigs would be crying at the trough where she had emptied their slop of refuse and bran. She would be carrying the milk pail down to the cow lot, and over the noise would come the sweet slow bell, elegant and tranquil and patient. There was no crowding at a trough in it, no pushing aside and no jealous complaining. It had enough. At the base of the stone tower lay the churchyard which undulated over the hills, the tombs set thickly and unevenly, crookedly about, massed and turned and mingled in confusion, but in the little enclosed yard behind the church and beside the priory, the Brothers that were dead lay in even rows, lying out straight one after another, in order, fenced off from the turning, cluttered graves outside.