Theodosia knew the intensities of Midi as she walked up the pasture toward the rise of the low hill, going now to view Prudence, two years old, not yet come to the age of milk, but beautifully marked and deeply characterized by the qualities her author had devised for her. The intensities of Midi contrasted the quiet of the herd at this hour, the hour before milking time, when the lush plenty of the grass and the filled rumen induced quiet, but the force of intense life lay back of the animals in the power of their great bodies and of the young that were gathered in the calf pens. Or walking along the grass toward the middle of the pasture, Caleb talked about the beginning of the breed near the river Tees at Croft and about the first Duchess, man borrowing and shaping a little the power under the earth. Midi and the child, Sallie, were gone now, had walked away toward the road after they had stopped to gather a few wild berries from the briars. Some little birds that were flocked in a clump of haws then began to sing, all in harmony, twittering together as a burst of high song out of a bush, as if it were to celebrate the coming of Aphrodite among the herds, to announce the beginnings of fine desires and the passing of Aphrodite among the pastures. They passed the haw trees and came then to a walnut sapling, but they turned back again and came the way they had gone. The insufficient summer twilight was beginning to settle to the pasture and the abundant but inadequate thorn bushes kept their singing, a burst of loud high twittering. The cows had been gathered to the barns. Caleb Burns, his hands touching her hands, was talking, had been talking from moment to moment. “I’ve dreamed about you so long, my arms fitted around you, seems, now you’re here I’m afraid, as if my mind would burst open. What will we do?... The moon tonight will be a petal from an old flower.” They were walking back toward the sugar tree, toward the highroad. “It’ll go, maybe, and we’ll never know what way it went. Between two summers and it’ll be gone, this drunkenness. I’ll have you then, maybe, the way Lucian West has Midi, unable to come to the house without I find you and have something to say about a gate-post or a milk can, God knows!... I saw you the day you came here, in the wagon with the peddler....” Night then, in the upper gallery, and she was trying to picture Caleb’s face, to restore it entirely now that it was not by. A hard pointed face, sharpened to a moment of anxiety, or diffused to a general scrutiny as he looked at Queen’s offspring, searching for blemishes, looked back then at her face. She saw him as a vague shape against the haw bushes. “I’m a-goen to give you Betty Hawthorne. The best cow I’ve got. If you’ll be so good as to have her until I can make you a better.”