‘I reckon you-all are ready,’ he said.

They hurried excitedly, tumbling the things out of the house into the wagon. Ellen cried softly as she rolled up her quilts and lapped her clothes into the bundle. She was acutely aware of the little loft room at the moment of leaving it, and she looked about at the brown splintered floor. She knew the knots and marks on the ladder, the shelf in the cubbyhole, the stones of the hearth. She wanted to go; she had talked much of going, of the stairway and the kitchen, of the cow she would milk, of the cream they would have. She wanted to go but her mind clung to its familiar objects. The roll of her things seemed very futile as she laid it on the doorsill, shapeless and burdensome and ugly, herself somehow so identified with it, with what she had, that she wept.

‘Oh, what for?’ she cried softly when she sat among the household goods at the back of the wagon. She saw the last of the yellow lane crying, ‘What for, anyway?’

Nellie and Henry rode on the front seat with the driver and as they rolled away from the lane Ellen watched them sitting huddled and restrained, their heads showing above the upturned chairs. The horses jogged gaily along the road, careless of their light burden, and presently Ellen was aware of the pleasant feel of the sun’s warmth on her shoulders. After a little she noticed the lilt of the horses and she found words on her lips that fitted in with the rhythms they made. Some little birds hopped about on the stone fences dropping little beads of winter song. The few white clouds stood back from the sun and runlets trinkled out of every field, out of every ledge. The green winter mosses along the road were full of life. The horses slopped merrily through the pools that stood along the low-lying bits of road. Something about the wagon jingled, as a loose chain or tire, and this made a gay accompaniment to the clatter of the hoofs and her lips repeated merrier phrases, merry nonsense jargons out of old remembered songs. They went by a little schoolhouse where heads bobbed up at windows to see them pass. She could see her mother and father more plainly now, for something had settled down out of the line of vision. Nellie had the brown scarf drawn about her head and Henry wore a tight old coat pulled up to the chin. Their bodies quivered with the quivering of the wagon-seat and they were talking eagerly, included in a chat with the driver. White and roan shorthorn cattle grazed in an upland field off to the right as the wagon came swaying lightly down on a slope and thundered briefly across a little bridge. When Ellen glanced forward again her mother and father had been looking back at her. They caught her glance and looked again, smiling. Nellie nodded her head comradely and said with her lips, ‘How you a-maken it?’ and Henry touched his hat in salute. ‘How nice we-all are. I didn’t ever know us to be so nice,’ Ellen said when she looked back at the merry hills. A warmth of being beat in her blood and in her breast it spread to a great size. Beyond her chair rose the safe and beyond that her own cot bed, up on end, familiar and gay, all there together, whatever happened, and the sun came down warm and lush. Her roll of bedding lay behind her chair; she could touch it with her hand, the blue cover sticking out from under the brown one and her clothing sticking out a little from the inner part.