"It's all over. You mustn't think about it." "I'm not. I'm thinking about the other thing.... The thing I did. And the dog, Mary; the dog." She knew what was coming. "You can't imagine what that place was like. Their sheep-run was miles from the farm. Miles from anything. You had to take it in turns to sleep there a month at a time, in a beastly hut. You couldn't sleep because of that dog. Jem _would_ give him me. He yapped. You had to put him in the shed to keep him from straying. He yapped all night. The yapping was the only sound there was. It tore pieces out of your brain.... I didn't think I could hate a dog.... But I did hate him. I simply couldn't stand the yapping. And one night I got up and hung him. I hung him." "You didn't, Roddy. You know you didn't. The first time you told me that story you said you found him hanging. Don't you remember? He was a bad dog. He bit the sheep. Jem's uncle hung him." "No. It was me. Do you know what he did? He licked my hands when I was tying the rope round his neck. He played with my hands. He was a yellow dog with a white breast and white paws.... And that isn't the worst. That isn't It." "It?" "The other thing. What I did.... I haven't told you that. You couldn't stand me if you knew. It was why I had to go. Somebody must have known. Jem must have known." "I don't believe you did anything. Anything at all." "I tell you I did." "No, Roddy. You only think you did. You only think you hung the dog." They got up out of the pit. They took the track to the schoolhouse lane. A sheep staggered from its bed and stalked away, bleating, with head thrown back and shaking buttocks. Plovers got up, wheeling round, sweeping close. "_Pee_-vit--_Pee_-vit. Pee-_vitt_!" "This damned place is full of noises," Roddy said. VIII. "The mind can bring it about, that all bodily modifications or images of things may be referred to the idea of God." The book stood open before her on the kitchen table, propped against the scales. As long as you were only stripping the strings from the French beans you could read. The mind can bring it about. The mind can bring it about. "He who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God, and so much the more in proportion as he more understands himself and his emotions." Fine slices of French beans fell from the knife, one by one, into the bowl of clear water. Spinoza's thought beat its way out through the smell of steel, the clean green smell of the cut beans, the crusty, spicy smell of the apple pie you had made. "He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return." "'Shall we gather at the river--'" Catty sang as she went to and fro between the kitchen and the scullery. Catty was happy now that Maggie had gone and she had only you and Jesus with her in the kitchen. Through the open door you could hear the clack of the hatchet and the thud on the stone flags as Roddy, with slow, sorrowful strokes, chopped wood in the backyard.