She would go. Frank came to sit with her frequently or he brought passages to read, tribute to her convalescing hours. “Good old Frank,” her tears surprised her in saying once when his departure clicked the latch of the gate. A dealer in old furniture came from Lester and bargained for the pieces. A crier sold the house from the gallery steps one noisy court day in May. The archaic hatchets and flints were dispersed, culled over by a collector from Louisville, some of them rejected and thrown into a large basket. Theodosia saved for herself Anthony’s books, and she had them packed into boxes to be hauled to the farm. Dr. Muir had been to call upon her aunt and to ask hospitality for the invalid. All was arranged. She would go. The way was sunny and long on the day of the journey, the road heavy to go, distorted with shadows, the hedges standing back far and the woods vistas spacious to the point of giving pain. As if bandage had been removed from a recent hurt or fracture, the confines of the town taken away, she spread painfully out through the hills and fields, through the ways to go. She closed her eyes and the car slipped lightly, too lightly, among the road windings. FIVE Doe Singleton said that she might choose any room above-stairs that pleased her, and she chose the one in which she and Annie had stayed, the west room. The high bed leaped at her unpleasantly and receded suddenly into diminished perceptions as she spread the sheets and quilts over it to prepare it for occupation. It funneled down suddenly into a very small object, a familiar pattern, a bed, when she focused her attention upon it, but left uncentered it bulged suddenly to unapprehended proportions, divided, proportion at war with proportion and quality. She opened the windows to the south sun and lay in the bed. There was no one in the house but the aunt, whose muffled, uncertain noises fell after undetermined intervals, and herself, who, lying in the bed, was subtracted from the content of the walls, length, breadth, and thickness therein contained, and extended as continuing in a running movement through history, past and future. The second day she noticed the leaves of the linden tree and how each one carried two small buds or pods held to the leaf by a slender green wire. At regular intervals the voice of her aunt called from below. “It’s ready now. You can come.” Below-stairs there would be food on a small table in a back room, her aunt’s bedroom. The bed stood pompously against the wall opposite the great fireplace, and the dogs came and went or rested before the open fire, lying down stiffly or arising. There was no servant and the dining-room across the hall was mouldy and dark. The food was always on the table when she came down the stairs, bread and meat and milk. There was coffee in a silver coffeepot. “I don’t myself keep any cows now,” Miss Doe said. “I got the milk for you from the tenant man on the place.” “Don’t you keep any cows any more?”