In the mid-morning a tall young man came along the fencerow, passing up from the creek. He stood under the locust tree and watched the labour or he talked with Mr Bodine. ‘Finished yesterday,’ he said. ‘Only a patch this time.’ Ellen knew the young man’s name.

‘Joe Trent, he is,’ Artie Pinkston had said, standing in the lane, ‘Old Man Sam Trent’s boy. He goes off somewheres to study now and then, but his pap brought him home here a while back to help put in the crops. They say he does a sight of work when he sets to. They say he’s a fine young man, friendly and easy to know, easy to get acquainted with a body. Just like his pappy before him. They say his pap come to this country withouten a cent, a cropper. And now look, he owns a right good farm. Some can make whilst some they don’t seem to get on so well. Old Man Trent has got a heap to be proud on. They say Joe’s got not one lazy bone in his body. He’s a worker, they say.’

He had come to the creek one April day when Ellen had gone there to get brush. He had seemed very delicate in his suit of clothes and his brown shoes that were that were narrow and thin, sometimes even gay and pleading. The first day he had talked to her about spring, about the wood, about anything, and his eyes had been bright. She had felt a new kind of smile come to her mouth and a new look come to her eyes. He had come there another day, asking absent-minded questions. She had felt very sad that day. Now when a shower came she stood with her father and Goodin under a thorn tree on the side of the field opposite the locust. The fine mist fell with a whispered sound and the robins set up their songs afresh. Joe Trent went at the first lapse in the rain, going toward the Bodine house, walking carefully to keep his brown shoes out of the wet grass. Ellen watched him go, feeling strange before her altered self. She rubbed the mud from her bare feet, dragging her ankles against the wet herbs. She bent her hat low against her cheeks to hide her strange eyes, and she heard fearfully her father’s words spoken to Goodin.

‘Hep Bodine thinks he knows all there is about farmen. Well, it’s his farm…’

That night she went to bed soon after supper, afraid of the talk below and dreading morning.

‘You’ll have us set out on the pike, that’s what you will with your eternal faulten.’

‘Hep Bodine thinks he owns a man that works on his place. I won’t stand none of his jaw…’

‘You keep your mouth shut or he’ll hear you. You’re not so bold as you talk. I’m a-tellen you…’

‘If Hep Bodine thinks…’

‘Where’d you go if you got set out on the road?’