Oh, my poor Nellie Gray

They have taken her away,

or he would play a mouth harp. Often as he passed along the road he would leave a paper of the sweets for Ellen who would be in the field. Bell’s hens were in a setting mood and she often came to sit with Henry to share in the taffy. Sometimes Ellen would pile her hair in its soft rolls and fasten a small blue ribbon at her throat, and then, if Tarbell came, she would sit apart smiling a little at the unveiled wooing, or she would laugh outright when she unrolled the bit of paper from the sweet drop he had kissed, and smile again as she passed into her hard white room and turned about from the clock shelf to the wooden chest. Jasper Kent’s money lay on the bottom of the chest underneath her blue dress of thin muslin, the cloth for which Nellie had bought from the peddler. Ellen had taken the cloth quietly and had tried on the garment quietly when Nellie had sewed the seams, but her eyes liked to linger on the blue folds that were sweet scented and crisp to touch. She had persuaded Nellie to buy herself a piece of bright cloth for a dress, and Nellie had chosen a grey with some small purple flower hanging in the mesh. They talked softly about the sewing of the seams and of whether there should be a bit of lace or a bow, for Ellen could not give delight or glee to a muslin or a frill now, her mind one with the wants of the fields, with the beasts and the ploughed trenches. In the fields she wore the faded dresses of the summer before, and there, seen distantly, her figure blended evenly with the turned soil or sank into the corn rows, now waist high or more. In the dark blue dress, now turned to grey by the sun and the wind and the rain, she moved almost unseen through the windows of the hay or came down the steep path among the stones beside the quarry. In the pale washed-out dress she drifted all morning up and down the lines of the tobacco, the tobacco flower come before its season, as the pale flower of the tobacco come to tend its young.