They avoided the town, taking turnings and crossroads, and at noon they stopped at a store set in front of valley fields where the roads went off in a Y. The driver and the storekeeper lifted two bales of fence wire into the wagon and tucked them snugly in a little beyond Ellen’s feet.

‘That’ll ride all right, Sissy. No trouble to you at all,’ the storekeeper said. ‘Hit looks like a boey constrictor, but hit’s only fence wire.’ When the old man talked his skin quivered and showed the tobacco stains running in the wrinkles about his mouth.

After they started on again the way was even gayer, for every little while someone was met and there were greetings and salutes exchanged with the driver. ‘The new tenants for Wakefield’s.’ Ellen would catch a phrase now and then from a vehicle passed. She felt herself and all of them become what they were said to be – new and tenants, something for Wakefield, something along with the big quick-stepping horses, along with her mother smiling and Henry waving his hand as if she were somebody else. They were ten miles west of the county seat now; she read the numbers on the mileposts. The road curved gently down among valley farms and crossed a wide creek. They were in a richer and better country, Ellen knew. The driver stopped at a white gate and pulled a long pole that hung out toward the road, and when the gate swung open the horses trotted through, hardly giving Henry time to pull the pole on the other side to close the gate. The Wakefield house stood above on a gentle slope, a large old house of blue-grey weatherboards with tall trees gathered about. The wagon kept in the valley, rounded a hill, put the house on the right, and thus came to a small whitewashed cabin set in a little yard of its own. The rear wall of the large house stood now divided from Ellen by cattle-lots and large white barns and was faint behind tall, close-standing trees.

The tenant house had three rooms, two below stairs and one above – the latter would be Ellen’s bedroom. A narrow staircase passed up from one of the lower rooms, the main room of the house. The other room, the kitchen, stood back a few feet and in the L was a little porch from which wooden steps went down into the yard. Ellen looked at the kitchen stove, walking around it, comprehending its doors and grate. Something like it but different came up in her mind, another smooth dark surface with doors that would open. The house seemed hollow and damp while she stood there, full of silences and voices suddenly speaking out. A broken flatiron lay behind one of the doors, but the room was swept clean. There was a shelf above the stove and another shelf in a corner. She could walk through the door and be standing at once in the larger room beside the fireplace where Henry was fanning a blaze under wood and chips. She could walk back through the door and there was the kitchen again, the front door going out onto the little porch, the back door going down tall steps into a hollow place behind the house where some out-buildings stood. It was very lovely and very strange. The rooms were full of hollowness and sharp sudden noises when anyone spoke.