She sat on the stile and searched his rough speech after his departure. He was a strong man, past middle life, sturdy and wind-stained, a hardness in the muscles of his face and some austerity in his eyes. His teeth were broken and yellowed with tobacco. He would look past her when he spoke, drawing his eyes as if to see afar, but when he looked back at her his face would gather to a sum of its severity. He lived with his brother in Aunt Deesie’s cabin, and neither he nor the brother had a wife. She would walk a little farther each day and sit to rest on the stile. Beyond the fence the ricks for feeding cattle had once stood, and she remembered the dogs on the day they had set upon her and little Annie, and she wondered if the dogs that were now about the house were, any of them, the same. An intense desire to have her former strength drove her to walk her distances several times a day, but she often sank wearily to the ground under some tree and lay there for an hour. As she lay thus on the ground she knew that Walter walked through the farm, his rough shoes brushing the low weeds, and that his brother Abe kept in the lower fields near the tobacco barn. She would gaze up at the insecure sky where the clouds turned on the horizon and watch the hazardous trees shake lightly in the wind and lose now a leaf and now another, or in the later summer two or three would fall. She knew that Walter knew that she lay to rest there; sometimes she would see his sullen face set forward as he tramped across the pasture rim. At long intervals her aunt hung a signal on the pillar of the portico and the liniment-man brought his truck to the door to sell her sugar, coffee, and tea. These days were always Thursdays. Sometimes she would walk to the truck and look in at the bottles and spice cans, all labeled in yellow, all lettered with the name of the brand. He would chant his tale again to try to tempt her buying. Spices, baking powders, ointments, camphor, ginger, orris root, sal hepatica, lice eradicator, flavors, perfumery, cake color, ice-cream powder, sage. “Here’s something to take the eye of a young lady. Perfumery and face powder. The best there is. Both in one box. Fifty cents to a dollar.” “She’s not much hand to fix up,” Miss Doe said. “Or ice-cream powders. Makes fine ice-cream. Freezes twice as fast too.” “Does it take an ice-cream freezer,” Theodosia asked. “And some ice, maybe? Or just the powder?” “Of course it takes a freezer. Or say, here’s a little something for a young lady that’s nice and particular.”