She stood on the bridge high above the water and watched the stars above and below. There were frogs and crickets singing, and katydids crying their flat notes. The black shadows of the black trees pushed into the water, overlapping. She stood very still at the rail of the bridge, scarcely breathing, leaning lightly on the wooden structure. Her own want was undefined, lying out among the dark trees and their dark images, and she reached for it with a great wish that shook her small body. After a while she whispered a little, brokenly, almost without breath, but the words were Tessie’s words, borrowed now because her own words were stricken.

‘Such a leetle house is all I want, no matter how leetle… I’d make it fair some way or how with things set about proper, or with vines and trees and flowerpots.’

She sat on the floor of the bridge, looking north down the stream, wondering why the town did not begin to appear against the sky and fearing, presently, that she had missed her way. It seemed a very long while since she had lain on the floor of the church, which now seemed far back on the road; it seemed far to the moonlight and far to the place where the dog had barked. The drinking men were far back in time. She lay on the floor of the bridge, close to the edge, and it seemed that she lay in an endless night between two sets of stars. Then she cried a little for her limbs were very cold, and after a while she forgot even the cold. There were streaks of dawn in the sky when she awakened and a twilight had come to take the place of the black nothingness and the dimly outlined shadows. A large white house stood on the tree-shaded hill before the bridge. A man walking beside the house peered down at her and she jumped up quickly and started off along the road, skipping with light steps, for the way curved up under dense trees. The people of the morning began to appear; a man came out of a farm gate riding a harnessed horse and leading another. When she was exhausted from skipping, she sat by the side of the road to catch her breath, and while she sat a negro woman in an old buggy came up from the way of the bridge and a ride was offered. The woman was going to town to wash clothes all day, she said. When Ellen left the buggy at a gate, she came to a little whitewashed cabin that sat on the roadside and here she had a drink of water at a pump in the yard.

‘Help yourself. Take all you want!’ the man said. He was milking a cow by the house door.

Down in the town she sat a long while on a curb by a church, resting and trying to feel out the ways of the place. Negro women came there with bundles of clothes tied up in sheets. They would say to each other in a way of greeting: ‘Powerful big county court today!’