Then a letter came to their letterbox that cut into the inner fibre of Ellen’s new life and made it more intense with purpose. She carried the letter across the field to Jasper where he worked at the fences and they read it together in the crisp cold. It was a summons from Squire Stigall for Jasper to appear before his court to be questioned in an incendiary investigation. Ellen put the white cloth she had been sewing deep in the trunk and they pondered the letter together even while their work lay apart, while Jasper mended the fences and she prepared their food in the cabin, or they pondered it while they slept or while they sat through the short evenings. The farmer came down to the cabin one morning angry over the straying of a pig which had escaped through a vent in the fence. He came without ceremony, thumping with his whip on the wall of the house, not troubling to knock at the door. The angry blow had seemed of a strength fit to burst the thin wall, and Ellen went out of the house to listen to his anger over the broken fence which he thought Jasper should have discovered. Ellen told him that Jasper’s work lay on the distant side of the farm, a fact which he knew quite well, told him mildly because of her remoteness from his anger and because of the deep-running currents of her life which held him in but very little place. She folded her hands under her arms to warm them as she stood, indifferent, beside the small doorway. She looked at the blue of the sky or she let her gaze flow swiftly down the long path Jasper would take in coming, her look speeding swiftly to the end of it where it fell away among the barns. She felt the vigour of her being as she stood in the sharp cold of the morning where all tender living things were withered, herself in her richness and vigour the most living thing in the whole sight, her skin kindled by the cold, her eyes bright, the child within her hidden yet but alive, her throat, her step, her standing figure even and firm. She listened to the farmer’s waning annoyance as he straightened the wires of the fence and laced in the pickets. She found two missing boards thrown aside among the brush and these she brought while he worked at the gap which he closed finally in easy good humour, eager to talk and to make a joke of the mishap, and his smile was intimate and kindly as if the broken fence were a bit of a secret they held together. He was middle-aged and full of life in his own kind, his hand firm on the fencewires, his face pink under his half-shaven scattered beard. Then he looked at the little house from all sides and said that he had laid off to build another room but that work was always pressing in another quarter, and she pointed out the spot where she and Jasper would like the addition built, and life ran higher and fuller in his being and poured out in a desire to assist life.