Some days later she heard the throb of another car on the driveway and presently a voice spoke to Doe Singleton at the door, the voice turning away, saying that it would come again. This would be Frank, she reflected. Her aunt would not bring him to her room because she was in bed and the aunt moved among a few old signs and tokens. None but the old dogs ever walked on the stairway except when she herself replied to the call from below, “Come on now, it’s ready.” Summer having advanced, the night-noises made a great swinging water, a vast throbbing sea of sound beating continually and arising in shrill waves, the crickets, the frogs, the toads, the treetoads, the katydids. An old voice then, a joyous rise and skurry of man’s speech, acutely remembered in all its inflections. “Ladybug, when you hear a katydid, it’s then six weeks till frost. Yessir. Six weeks. I often took notice to a katydid that-away. It’s a forerunner to frost for fair.... Oh, it’s a good morning.... Someways I always liked a hilltop....” * * * * * The tenant would come about the house talking noisily, his voice striking the wall with a token of life in the fields. Cuttings of hay, stand of wheat, stand of rye, prime good crop of burley this time, “fair good corn if it turns out well in the shock at plucken time”—these were his cries as they smote the upper wall and rolled in at the open windows. There would be money from Doe Singleton’s acres to augment her bank account and her securities. Once her banker called, making a low clatter of steps and voice as he went in and out. One of the dogs, old True, died in the upper hallway, stretched out stiff when the morning food called Theodosia down the stairs, laid out across the carpet. Later one of the tenant men dragged her away, the body pulled by a rope making a dull stiff cluttering of noises on the hard stair. The strong sour odor of her death pervaded the hall for many days after. Theodosia did not keep the count with the katydid, but the frost came, the leaves richly responding. The katydids had sung their own well-timed requiem. After the season of the first frost the rains set in, plodding heavily on the old walls, wetting the ceilings where the roof leaked. The drip of the water made a continuous impertinence upon her carpeted floor. She arose and set several basins under the drips and climbed shivering back into the bed. In the morning after a continued rainfall of many hours her bed stood under a new drip. “The roof upstairs leaks everywhere, Aunt Doe,” she said. “There’s hardly a dry place left. Maybe you never noticed it, but the roof ought to be mended. The plaster might fall.”