She could have a pink dress, or a blue one, or white, and perhaps she would have a hat with flowers, and these pleasures, anticipated, gave grace to all her thought. The egg money would buy for her. She turned away from the milk can where she had poured her pail, turning back to another set of udders. Mr Al was coming down the cowpen smiling at her.

‘You could have that-there heifer down at your house for your own cow when she grows up. I give her to you.’

‘You give her to me for good, to keep?’ She was in a tremble.

‘Sure. She’s your cow. Your’n. You saved me my little thoroughbred. That-there heifer down in your yard, she’s your’n. Your cow.’

Ellen was out much in the changing weather – sun, rain, wind, sleet, sun, wind. The gales whipped her garments and bent her skirts in changing curves and lines. Clean, quick weathers, friendly and hearty and bold, swept over the farm hills, following her down into hollows and up onto slopes, along the fencerows and up into wooded crests. The weather, with its winds, snatched at her hair and tore at her garments; it wet her face with its rain and laid wet fingers on her arms and shoulders, or warm amorous hands on her back and loins. Dorine brought flowers into the house and set them in jars of water before the windows, brought dogwood blossoms or lilacs or violets gathered from the rise above the marsh. Flowers on the hillside and then flowers in the house; Ellen was glad that she knew of this; she had never seen flowers in the house before. A redbud tree came into deep red blossoms back of the old abandoned stable, fading slowly day by day to pink, and MacMurtrie’s bees were humming over it. The wind was new albeit it was the same that had blown before the time of man came to the hillside. From MacMurtrie’s pasture would come the baaing of lambs, and all about from farm to farm were the soft young litters of pigs, the stiff colts, the calves brown or white, the whimsical adult mules, aloof and apart, despising the young, and the animal mothers of beasts, meek and unconscious out in the weather, offering suck. Ellen brought a branch of thorn blossom into the house and put it in a glass jar on the shelf above the fireplace, smiling a little for she was remembering Dorine’s words, Dorine’s laugh, Rosie’s words, Rosie’s quick smiles and little skipping steps, Jonas’s words, and Elmer’s, and Mr Townley’s quick music. Rosie was always giving things, bringing presents. ‘Here’s a little mess of teacakes for your mammy,’ or ‘I brought a little example of the sugar bread I made,’ and she would hand forward a little package as she said it. Sometimes when Jonas or Elmer passed along the farm road they would shout to her as she worked in the garden or mended the fence or cut the stovewood for the dinner fire, ‘Hi there, Elleen!’ or ‘Think hit’ll snow, Elleen!’ They had made her name like Dorine’s, gathering her in with Dorine in the sounding of the name. Sebe Townley often came, leaning on the fence in the dusk while she milked the cow.