When he was gone she went into the house, moving dreamily through the moonlit rooms. To marry and go away, the idea came into her mind slowly, spreading unevenly through her sense of the half-lit kitchen and her own room which was bright with a square of white light on the floor. She fell asleep with no formed wish in her mind and no decision, but when Nellie called her out of sleep soon after dawn, while she dressed quickly in the faded blue garment, she heard a catbird singing clear fine phrases on a post near her window, clear phrases that were high and thin, decisive and final, and she knew at the instant that she would marry Jasper and go with him wherever he went, and her happiness made a mist that floated about her body as she carried the feedings to the hogs and opened the chicken boxes. She would remember every movement of his face, as it looked away, lost in its story, as it turned to her again, leaning nearer, and his name came often to her throat and lingered there, on the verge of utterance, the word her mind had been seeking, now grown fixed and eternal. She moved through the morning, while the name grew in her being, surrounded by her own renewed beauty which identified itself each moment with every lovely thing her eyes recognised, such as the pattern of black and white on a chicken’s feather, as the figured undulations crisscrossed on the bark of the ash tree, the waves of the tall, full-grown corn. As the day passed, her need to see him grew, to rest her eyes upon his form and thus to quiet her longing. But the morning passed and her work did not take her to the fields and she did not once hear his voice admonishing the team in the upper fields or meadows. She remembered Albert Wingate and his treachery and thought with apprehension of old Mrs Wingate, who was torn two ways by her maternal passion and her avarice. Toward nightfall a great rain came with thunder and lightning. Coming in at dark Henry said that Albert had come back to the farm, he himself had seen him riding pell-mell through the pasture, and all through the night the security of her snug, weather-tight room mocked at her as it shut her away from the storm.