For hours she went about her work with the thoroughness that she exacted of herself on days of mental disturbance. Not until the car was waiting at the door, and Fluvanna was hastening out with robes and pillows, did Dorinda turn aside from her ordinary activities, and go into the room she had selected for Jason. Yes, everything was in order. The floor and walls were clean; the windows had been closed after an airing; and the fire burned brightly on the sunken stones in the fireplace. Even the big iron kettle steamed away on the footman. There was soap in the soap-dish on the washstand; an abundance of soft warm blankets covered the bed; on the candlestand stood a blue thermos bottle, and her mother's Bible lay beside it, with the purple bookmarker she had embroidered marking a favourite text. "It ought to seem pleasant," she thought, "after the poorhouse." Outside, she found John Abner at the wheel of the car and Fluvanna arranging the pillows on the back seat. "Would you like to drive, Dorinda?" "No, but I'll sit in front with you. When we come back, one of us will have to sit with him, and I'd rather it would be you." IX They talked little on the long drive. John Abner was intent on the wheel, and Dorinda held her cape closely about her, and gazed straight ahead at the twisted road and the hazy brightness of the October landscape. A veil of glittering dust drifted up from the meadows of life-everlasting; in the underbrush by the fences, sumach and sassafras made splashes of crimson and wine-colour; farther away, the changing woods were tossed in broken masses against the cloudless arch of the sky. As they approached the Courthouse, the country was less thinly settled, and throngs of barefooted children ran beside the car and offered bunches of prince's feather and cockscomb. In some of the fields men were ploughing, and among them Dorinda observed the phlegmatic faces of Swedes or Germans. As the car sped by, they stopped in their ploughing or cutting, and turned to stare curiously like slow-witted animals. Over all was the blue haze of October and the drifting silver pollen of life-everlasting. At Doctor Stout's, a new green and white cottage near the road, which looked as trivial as a butterfly on the edge of the autumnal solitude, they were told that the doctor had already gone to the poorhouse.