The bright cold of November was crisp over the winter herbs and the fallen leaves, making shaggy the hides of the beasts when the hairs snarled and pied to exclude the frost of the night. A great wind had blown all the night of the dance, the out-reachings of a cyclone which had passed over the farms to the south. Rumours had come of trees uprooted, and a small elm on MacMurtrie’s high ridge had been twisted out of the earth by the storm. Ellen had passed her hands over the roots of the tree and knew how they had once sprangled through the solid earth, wondering at the deep hole ploughed out by the tree as it twisted itself free in the gale. Now the knotted roots stood up in the air and she could pass her hand along the disordered snags. She could perceive that there had been a great force in the storm but she could never know it or feel it with her fingers or taste it or see it now that it was gone. She had run to MacMurtrie’s hill in the early morning after the dance, summoned by Henry’s words, ‘A tree tore up plumb by the roots.’ Jonas was ploughing now for the autumn wheat on Dorsey’s land, going up and down the furrows in the bright hazy air. Ellen knew the day he began the field and she knew the dark even spread of colour and light as the ploughed rectangles grew day by day and consumed the areas of withered stubble, although Dorsey’s farm was several miles away, for she knew what field he overturned and the nature of the ploughing.

All day her mind clung about his furrows or she hovered over his team and his plough in her thought, her hand on the plough handle or on the plough line, not merged with his but accompanying. At the dance he had sat among the men, and in the days that followed he had stayed apart. ‘Jonas has got religion,’ Elmer had said, ‘Jonas has settled down.’ Dorine said that he must be sick. ‘He looks dauncy,’ she said, but Ellen knew this was not true for she knew how steadily his plough went through the stubble, having reports from this one and that. Or once, riding to the store at the crossing of the roads she met Jonas as he brought his team through a gate. Then he looked at her, biting at his lips, but after a moment he was glad that he saw her again. He would have something to tell her, he said. He would come when he had time; he would come the first chance he had. He closed the gate and climbed onto one of the horses to ride over the field to his furrow, but once, before she went beyond the road’s turning, he waved his hand in the old salute. He would come. He would tell her whatever it was that troubled him. She went forward through the week placidly, slowly, watching for Saturday when she thought that he might be expected. It was Monday when he had spoken to her at the gate. She would wait. It would be some small thing that he had to tell. Then they would walk to Rosie’s and get black walnuts for the winter, or they would plan a surprise party for Dorine. She thought that he had changed in his nature and perhaps he would not want to go to parties hereafter. He had become matured and settled, then. She would do as he liked to do, sit quietly apart with him if he so desired.