She heard wheels coming and she sprang to her feet, caught in a sudden whorl of nervousness. Joe Trent was coming in a buggy with Emphira Bodine, the farmer’s daughter, the horse ambling along under loosened reins. Ellen stood ready to speak, her head lifted, but Joe Trent looked back without a sign. He touched the horse lightly with the whip and said something further to Emphira:

‘Now I’ll tell you how it is. You take those business colleges…’

The buggy went on along the road, jolting easily over the stones, the sounds of the wheels growing each instant more flat and remote. Ellen could no longer hear the loose spoke rattle, and then the noises became one running sound that thinned away into the twilight as the vehicle rounded the curve of the road and was lost. She walked back to the cabin, her arms folded under her breast. She passed up the ladder lightly, as her custom, and retired to her bed in the last faint glow of the dusk. Little shivers of cold passed over her as she took off her clothing in the summer evening, and her hands were stiff and awkward as she pushed off her shoes. She heard a mockingbird singing in the bushes out toward the lane, singing a futile song which reiterated its uselessness and changed its hollow phrases from moment to moment. The sound fell flat upon a flat air. ‘That old mock-bird. I wish he’d shut up,’ she whispered.

If the song had sorrow or wistfulness in it, or any lightness or joy or form, these took place in some other medium than the world of that dusk. The shallow jargon beat upon her pained ears and made no tone. Behind the hard vibrations of this singing the evening seemed very still and very long. She heard the cattle come down to the creek to drink, heard them slopping in the water and pulling at the locust sprouts beyond the fence. The warmth of the bed shut around her and after a while the sounds of the night became remote in their setting of stillness. The well-being of sleep stole over her limbs and she could see white clovers in a pattern, designed against dark threads of cloth. ‘I’m lovely now,’ this well-being said. ‘It’s unknowen how lovely I am. It runs up through my sides and into my shoulders, warm, and ne’er thing else is any matter. I saw some mountains standen up in a dream, a dream that went down Tennessee. I will tell somebody what I saw, everything I saw. It’s unknowen how lovely I am, unknowen.’

She was in the ravine, far up past the third pool, to gather brush. Some men were working on a high slope, dragging out walnut stumps, their axes leaving the sound behind at each stroke. Their voices came down to her strange and thin. Mr Bodine was slowly clearing out the hillside, a little now and a little then, and after a while it would be a steep tobacco field. She saw someone moving among the brush on the slope opposite that on which the men were working, she saw clothing gleaming an instant in the sun and a form slipping back into the brush. It was Joe Trent keeping behind the redbud glade, and when he saw that she looked up he beckoned to her. He signalled many times but he was careful to keep behind the redbud clumps.