A quick flare of words. ‘What I want with you, Louse Patch?’ but she could not define the saying or set it apart from its tones and it fell back unheeded into nothingness.

She thought of a room where there would be fair colours and she felt herself to be stepping down hard white stairs, walking on wide stairs, a low wind fluttering her sleeve. An angry burst of tone came from near the fireplace.

‘Your pappy ought to come on now and eat his victuals while they’re hot.’

‘He might be a friend I’d know all my days. “We’ll take a walk,” he says. “Any day you say.”’ She saw little flecks of amber on brown threads of cloth, minutely seen.

‘Your pappy ought to come. What’s he a-loiteren for? In trouble I reckon…’

‘And so this is your axe.’ The sinking fire made a pink glow on the cups, three cups standing together on the table.

‘I don’t want you, Lousy Brat. I wouldn’t tech your lousy rags.’

Nellie lit the lamp with a small splint of wood which she held out to the dying fire. ‘We might as well get ready to move out. I’d lay my last quarter on it. A-stirren up Hep Bodine. Your pappy ought to come on.’

The outside became deeply blue after the lamp was lit, blue air seen through the glass of the window. ‘Somebody I’d know all my enduren life.’

‘And now he’s lost a yearlen calf…’ Nellie returned the supper to the hearth with angry comments. ‘We might as well move out now.’

The trees spread upward into the blue air and were lost, and far away some geese, disturbed, were crying, the tones coming as high thin music flaring upward into the dark. She would have something pink to wear, or fair blue, a bow or a ribbon somewhere on her body. Blue cloth could go trailing over wide stairs, down white steps… herself spreading and trailing through blue cloth, gentle and sweet-scented… all her enduring life…

Henry came, sullen and tired, bent from his week in the fields. They ate the food in silence, the only noise that of clicking knives and sweeping spoons.

The grass was high and full with seeds and the white clover was in bloom – late June. Ellen sat by the mouth of the lane watching in the dusk. In a little while she would go to bed, pulling her body lightly up the ladder with her arms. She liked to sit in the white clover by the road, away from the after-supper noises of the cabin, a white clover of thought playing over her mind and spreading a sweetness through her flesh, while another, less than thought, lapped folds of being around her. Gentle, inclusive folds of being lay across her shoulders, included her, covered her with vaporous arms, completed her and gathered her into an undefined sheath. She plucked a few clover blossoms and laid them on her skirt, placing them with care. Feeling could not take words, so melted in and merged it was with the flowers of the grass, but if words could have become grass in Ellen’s hand: ‘It’s pretty stuff, clover a-growen. And in myself I know I’m lovely. It’s unknowen how beautiful I am. I’m Ellen Chesser and I’m lovely.’