Or Susie Whelen stopped on her way from church on Sunday, lingering in the toll house door. Her eyes were blue, and her wide full mouth found its smiles easily, and her step was intimate on the cabin floor, at home anywhere. Ellen went away to the back of the farm and walked on the stony hill above the quarry. She climbed the fence to Wingate’s woods and went down into the far ravine where the swine pen was broken down, and there she saw Jasper’s large footprint in the mud, his rough shoe with its broken heel printed in the wallow. He would come back. She went about her tasks with a strain pulling at her face and at her eyes, drawing inwardly. She milked the cow each night and morning or slopped the hogs or gave them their fattening corn, or dug the potatoes in the garden, speaking little, waiting. He would come back. When a week had passed the air of expectation went out of the house, and Nellie turned to sewing at a shirt for Henry, leaving Ellen’s dress half sewed. Henry went away to the barn to work in the tobacco without comment, and the fire and Jasper’s going were not talked of any more. Jasper’s probable whereabouts fell out of the talk in the kitchen before the second week had passed. The chest was no longer locked for it was empty of any treasure. Its key lay on the floor and its lid stood open, waiting, and as she passed into her room and closed the door behind her to sit for an hour or more, her waiting breath whispered, ‘He will come.’ Or one day, angered at some other mishap, Nellie said: ‘He’s gone for good. You’ll never see a sight of him again.’

‘He’s gone for good,’ she flung out from above the hissing grease of the stove. ‘Ne’er another sight of him will you see.’

‘I will see a sight of him,’ Ellen said from the door. ‘He’ll come back like he said he would.’ She had seen then that Nellie was weeping.

She went up to the pit below the quarry wall and sat for a time among the stones. He would come back, her mind continued to affirm, but a great fear stood in her body, for there was nothing to bring him back except herself. She arose from the ground and walked among the herbs of the field or she wandered to the edge of the pool, her mother’s words still hammering at her ears. There was nothing now to bring him back except herself. The water from the autumn rains lay clear and bright over the white rocks, and she found herself searching in the water, peering down into it, hole after hole, walking away and returning to look again, hoping now that he had gone far to some remote country and was moving there in life, half knowing as she searched in the pools that her fear to see some water-soaked body lying among the stones was ill devised.