When at last she told me that there was a man ‘dead’ in the box, and that they had put him into the ground, I felt sure that the black man was in some way the cause of the trouble. I remembered the look he had given me at the barn door, and the cough. I was filled with wonder that no one had attempted to rescue the ‘dead,’ and then with fear and awe at the power of the black man. Whenever I saw him in the lane I ran away, he was so very black. Nor was the white surplice ever more than a subterfuge to make him like the boys in the choir, while his unnatural voice, praying or preaching, sounded as if it came up out of the hole in the ground where the ‘dead’ had been put away. “How glad I was always, to be back home from the church; though dinner was ready I walked round the garden, touching the fruit-trees one by one, stopping a minute in a corner where I could be unseen and yet look at the house and the thick smoke pouring out of the kitchen chimney. Then I rushed in and kissed my mother. The rest of the day was very still, no horses or carts going by, no sound of hoes, only the cows passing to the milkers. My father and my mother were both very silent on that day, and I felt alone and never wanted to stray far; if it was fine I kept to the garden and orchard; if wet, to the barn. The day seems in my memory to have always been either sunny or else raining with roars of wind in the woods on the hills; and I can hear the sound, as if it had been inaudible on other days, of wind and rain in the garden trees. If I climbed up into the old cherry-tree that forked close to the ground I could be entirely hidden, and I used to fancy myself alone in the world, and kept very still and silent lest I should be found out. But I gave up climbing the tree after the day when I found Mrs Partridge there before me. I never made out why she was up there, so quiet.