The others had, so strangely, a certain pain and dulness. She had a sturdy power of reaction against the melancholy and the painful, and as to-day she could not, somehow, fix her mind unswervingly upon the one clear hour, and the others perplexed and hurt, her mind at last turned with decision from any contemplation whatsoever of the round of events which lay behind her presence here, in March, upon the ridge behind Gilead Balm. Rising, she left the cucumber tree and walked along the crest of the ridge. The wind was not blowing now, the sunshine was very golden, the little leaves were springing. She crossed the ribbon-like plateau to its northern edge, and stood, looking down that slope. It was somewhat heavily wooded, and in shadow. It fell steeply to a handsbreadth of sward, a purling streamlet, sunken boulders, a wide thicket and a wood beyond. Hagar, leaning against a young beech, gazed down the shadowed stillness. Her eyebrows lifted at their inner ends, lines came into her forehead, wistful markings about her lips. Sometimes when she knew that she was quite alone she spoke aloud to her self. She did this now. "I haven't been here since that day it happened.... Six years.... I wonder if he ran away again, or if he stayed there to the end. I wonder where he is now. Six years...." The wind rose and blew fiercely, rattling in the thicket and bending every tree; then it sank again. Hagar leaned against the trunk of the beech and thought and thought. As a child she had been speculative, everywhere and all the time; with youth had come dreams and imaginations, pushing the older intense querying aside. Now of a sudden a leaf was turned. She dreamed and imagined still, but the thinker within her rose a step, gained a foot on the infinite, mounting stair. Hagar began to brood upon the state of the world. "Black and white stripes like a zebra.... How petty to clothe a man--a boy he was then--like that, mark him and brand him, until through life he sees himself striped black and white like a zebra--on his dying bed, maybe, sees himself like that! Vindictive. And the world sees him, too, like that, grotesque and mean and awful, and it cannot cleanse his image in its mind. It is foolish." The wind roared again up and down the ridge. Hagar shivered and began to move toward the warmer side; then halted, turned, and came back to the beech. "I'll not go away until the sun comes from under that cloud and the wind drops. It's like leaving him alone in the thicket down there, in the cold and shadow." She waited until the sun came out and the wind dropped, then took her hand from the beech tree and went away. Leaving the ridge, she came to the overseer's house, hesitated a moment, then went and knocked at the kitchen door.