Presently Rosie came and tried on the hat to show Ellen how it became herself, her generous round face beaming with its yielding, ‘It’s prettier on Ellen, now, for a fact it is.’ By and by Jonas came away from the men to talk with them, the glow of the flower lingering in Ellen’s breast, and Rosie took them to the kitchen and gave them each a dish of sweetened cherries she had preserved the spring before and gave them cake.

Later, going home, they climbed the steps onto the little porch and longed audibly for spring. ‘It looks like winter just can’t break,’ Jonas said, and hand in hand they went in to the hearth fire. Then Nellie asked Jonas to stay and eat his supper and this pleased Ellen very much. When she went up to the cowpens to help milk the cows he went too, carrying her pail and milking one of her cows while she milked the other. He chatted a little with John Bradshaw and Ben, who accepted his presence without comment, and all was sweetly familiar and casual. The lowing of the cows came to Ellen as something familiar and beseeching, and it met a willingness and tender pity in her being. In willingness and tender pity she poured the last of the milk into the great can and passed with Jonas through the gate and across the pasture, his free hand reaching for her hand and she, consenting, walked beside him but neither spoke on the way. The cows were quiet, but their remembered lowing continued, beseeching. The thumping of their feet on the hard turf merged with her rising tenderness, and the latching of the gate was a renewed token of it and their steps on the porch, their long caress in the dark – small fulfilment of her infinite affirmation.

They sat by the fire during the evening eating the sugar bread that Nellie had baked and talking of all the incidents of the farms, of the closed fence. They sat, Ellen at the corner in the little chair, then Nellie in her accustomed place and then Henry, looking at the flame, dazed by the flame. Jonas sat at the other end of the hearth, his feet on the stones, or he pounded hickory nuts on the dog iron with a loose stone, breaking away the shell with careless hands and tossing the largest kernels across to Ellen or giving an entire cracked nut to Henry or Nellie. There was no lamp but the light of the freshly built fire was yellow and bright, or when the fire fell away the pink glow survived and coloured their faces and their persons but left the back of the room darkened. When they had sat their fill in the warm glow and when they fell into reminiscent sadness or speculation, Ellen or Henry would toss on more wood from the pile and after the fire had died away more dully as it searched the new wood, it leaped into blaze again, and once with the leaping Henry sang a song, shuffling his feet on the boards of the floor.