Effie Turpin came to see her during the summer, staring in understanding and good will. She told the names of all the people who lived up and down the roads and who owned land and who rented. Sebe Townley was a nice fellow and Mr Jim, his uncle, played on a guitar and was a master musicianer. She herself lived in the torn-downdest place you’d ever see, just a plumb shanty. She talked often of Miss Cassie MacMurtrie who was, she said, free-hearted and kind, would give anything she had to a body that needed it. She could ride a horse like a man, out on the hills of a night with Scott and the men. The next day you would see her busy with the hens, managing the little chickens, cooking the dinner sometimes, and milking if the hands were gone. A pretty woman, a beauty with big quick eyes and a heavy suit of hair. When she herself had had lung fever one winter Miss Cassie had come every day for a while and had brought a warm comforter and something hot to rub on her chest to drive the frost out of her lungs. Miss Cassie owned the land herself for she had heired it from her father, but Scott MacMurtrie, her husband, worked it and made a heap of money off his fine horses and his crops until he was as rich as cream. Effie would leave slowly, reluctantly, hardly able to go at all, and long after her departure Ellen would keep a rich sense of the land, all the land about, as filled with an ever-increasing people, gathering into her knowledge incessantly. People were coming into the land, filling the country all about, and her life ran more quickly, leaping from day to day, as her knowledge spread beyond the farm and took in MacMurtrie’s, spread even further and caught at the farms in the glen where names and faces were now known a little.

One day in autumn when Ellen came down from the hill with a few hickory nuts in her apron, another girl came up MacMurtrie’s path just beyond the wire fence. The tractor in the distant barnlot, where the silo was being filled, made a low throb run through the farm while she stopped to talk, and this pulse beat into her sense of the girl, whose hair was pale brown and whose fingers tapped lightly on the wires of the fence, slim fingers with wild grape stains about their tips. She had never seen this girl before and they told each other their names. The richness of the autumn came into the air, the throb of the engine, the abundance of the farm, the hickory nuts which she offered to the girl and which her thin hands took. She was Dorine Wheatley.

‘We moved into MacMurtrie’s tenant house a while back,’ she said. ‘Are there any parties around here? Any fellows to have a good time with?’

The broods of turkeys were white instead of brown for Miss Tod was trying a white breed, and the waves of their undulating bodies as they flowed about Ellen up and down the pasture were white and dusty yellow. Miss Amanda Cain, who lived with the MacMurtries, a cousin to Miss Cassie, raised bronze fowls and Miss Tod had changed to the white sort to save confusion. All summer Ellen had heard a cry over toward the marsh, a woman calling