She was working alone on the hillside. Henry had gone for the seeds and was long in returning. She gathered stones from the ploughed soil and piled them in her neat mound, and the wind continued to blow off the hilltop. She found spotted ladybugs hidden under the leaves and the twigs; they shone out like jewels in the brown and black of the earth. Far away toward MacMurtrie’s cedar trees doves were crying, and over the ploughed field plovers went circling, singing on the wing. To the north-east the hills rolled away so far that sight gave out, and still they went, fading down into blue hazes and myths of faint trees; delicate trees stood finer than hair lines on a far mythical hill. She piled stone after stone on the mound, carrying each across crumbled earth that the plough and the hoe had harried. The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, ‘in the time of man’. The wind lapped through the sky, swirling lightly now, and again dashing straight down from the sun. She was leaning over the clods to gather a stone, her shadow making an arched shape on the ground. All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted:

‘Here I am!’

She waited listening.

‘I’m Ellen Chesser! I’m here!’

Her voice went up in the wind out of the ploughed land. For a moment she searched the air with her senses and then she turned back to the stones again.

‘You didn’t hear e’er a thing,’ she said under her breath. ‘Did you think you heared something a-callen?’

Ellen’s room had been papered with a yellow print at some time long past, but in the meanwhile the roof had leaked and the water had run down the walls, which were now stained with brown marks that changed with each rain. When she first gazed at them as she lay in her bed they were monsters depicted in shadows and running lines of brown and clouds of amber. They became demons impaled on trees, on walls, crucified on bars of black and dying lewdly, not decently agonised on their crosses. One spouted a jet of water from a snout that protruded from its armless trunk, laughing with a great jaw. After the next rain a woman in a long shawl came walking through the crosses and a slim hand held up a flower. Another time hands were sinking under tawny water, calling-out hands, but the rains of April smudged all out and began a new story with large bears running after little beings of some sort. Ellen stood turning about in the little room. She had hung her wardrobe on the nails of the east wall, her skirt of black wool, her dark waists, and her nightdress. The cot stood by the south window, through which came the April sun to make a long warm rectangle on the bare floor, and the morning with its hard light searched out every meagreness of the apartment. The window panes were marked with smudges left by the painter’s careless hands long ago, and Ellen had not been able to wash the glass clean and clear. The floor tilted a little toward the south wall. Ellen turned about in the morning glare, bending her neck to look at herself, stepping about to search out the ways of her movements.