She came away quickly, bringing four eggs in her apron and hurrying through her tasks, going up to the milking pens with Amanda Cain in her mind, and Scott MacMurtrie and Miss Cassie, thinking how Scott and Amanda came to the mouldering old barn, a den of rats and snakes, and how they flirted with the horror of the place and with disclosure to make their evil more sweet. Then Scott would go to the hills with the hounds and Amanda would slip back into the house to sit through the evening with Miss Cassie, sewing a sly seam or reading a page. She walked through the cattle pens knowing this, herself the only one knowing, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s’, or she glanced down at her strong body and remembered Amanda Cain’s slippers with their little bows at the latch. In the milking pen she heard Ben’s croaking words, ‘Miss Cassie, she bought her a mare today, I see Miss Cassie a-riden a new hoss,’ and only the week before Mr Al, standing in the gate, calling back to Mr Dick, ‘Scott and Cass will sign the note,’ or another voice from Miss Tod’s yard, heard over the hedge, ‘Scott and Cassie are a handsome married couple, as handsome as any ever you’ll see. Did you ever see Cassie out a-fox-hunten with Scott? Both the same height on a horse and Cassie not afraid of the devil himself.’

Coming down from the pens Ellen stared so intently at the herbs along the path that they swam and floated near her eyes. Amanda Cain was a shape lying back in her mind, a sour pain that cut swiftly through her flesh, a sweet evil that lay snugly nested deep in body somewhere, that turned in its secret nest and drew back into a deeper cradle and laughed, bending one corner of its mouth downward. She was a lightning that went crookedly across the sky and lay down to rest in some secret place. She herself, Ellen, was the only one who knew, she thought, and she would never tell any of the farms. All evening her mind would return to Amanda Cain and to the swift step in the barn, and into her secret knowledge came the thought of Amanda Cain bearing a child in the straw of the mouldering feeding frame and hiding the child away there while it lived and grew. Its image would arise unbidden, a phantom, a naked child of no sex, having a slim long face and a mouth that shut into a thin line and hair in a tumble of curls on its forehead. Holding their knowledge, she lay between them, intensely sensible of their way, seeing herself vividly reflected in their common knowing, ‘that girl on Wakefield’s place’, until she shuddered to see herself passing among the fields and pens. The image that haunted the barn would arise unbidden, a child of no sort, running over the decayed floor. It would catch the lizards if they ventured into the doorway and eat away their lank sides, and in the evening after the lamp was lit, hearing the whippoorwill’s call, the lonely quiver and lash of the notes was like a thong, and she would think, ‘Mandy Cain’s brat is a-cryen.’