The great pones lay over hot coals to bake, the flying ashes dusting over them. The books were piled on the deep window sill. The bed in the back of the room was spread with a dark pieced quilt of some old design. Dust had settled over the quilt and over the pillows that were laid in funeral rigidity at the top of the bed. Walking near the bed to examine the design of the quilt, Theodosia suspected that her aunt did not sleep in the bed. “Is this the sunshine-and-shade quilt?” she asked. “Did you piece it? You bought it from an old woman. It’s pretty and faded now, the colors blended. They’re pretty, faded together like that....” The dust on the quilt and on the pillows made her know they were never disturbed. The quilt was clean under the pillows and the bed was always plumped carefully, the quilt on it in the same way. It was never used, she surmised, and she wondered where her aunt lay to sleep. There was a roll of old quilts thrown into the storeroom where the food was kept. Miss Doe brought out a small leather cake of wheat bread she had cooked by the fire and a bit of conserve that was old and dry. A few brown crackers. * * * * * On her way to the wood-lot in the first cold of a November day when the wind was whipping the trees and shrubs and the leaves were falling in mad disaster, “A woman, I am, walking to gather firewood in a wild storm,” she said. In a wind-whipped bush she found a song-sparrow’s nest, revealed now to sight by the upturned branches and the dispersing leaves. She broke the nest from the bush and carried it away. It was made of fine twigs rounded and woven with perfect care, the wooded ends and strands growing more delicate as they approached the center, the pool where the eggs had lain. This cup was lined with human hair, soft and red-brown, laid in an exquisite hollow to make a lining, her own hair. Walking back through the angry air that twisted her garments and beat her steps from the path, a wind that would cry “It is done, make a swift end then,” and would tear life out of the trees and wrench summer off from the sagging vine on the house wall, a fervor of joy welled in her senses and spread backward to some quiet inner part. She had had this ineffable relation with the bird. Unknown to her, the nest had lain on the bough of the old lilac bush all summer, had been built in the spring. The wind slammed the door on the outside violence and she was free of bodily struggle, ribbons of exhaustion and pain unwinding upward into her thighs and back. She placed the nest on her table and looked at it from time to time, picking it delicately apart to try to discover its order. In the untended pastures the withered white-top and frost-flowers, rejected by the horses, shook stiffly in the cold gusts. The silkweed puffs had blown and their shards were left standing above the dried sweet-fern and the bittersweet. It was now the dark season when night comes on at the earliest hour.