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 the two boys as they followed her about while she fed the chickens and tended the rabbits and hoed the cabbages and the rows of beans. She loved to put cookies into their chubby little grimy hands and twists of sugared popcorn in the pockets of their overalls. She had a sweet tooth herself, so she nearly always had such things about the house. They were near of an age, all four, and happy together.

He would meet her on the edges of the pasture slopes where the blackberries grew and help her fill her tin bucket with the large, juicy berries. Here in the embrace of the sun the earth swooned with midsummer heat. Bees drowsed over the patches of steeplebush. Here and there tall stately stalks of ironweed lifted their great crowns of royal purple. The scent of flowering milkweed distilled out into the hot sunshine was heavy and sweet. Heavier and sweeter was the smell of purple alfalfa blossoms blown across the pasture in warm whiffs.

As they strayed about over the close cropped grass among the brambles and dock and patches of steeplebush, they spoke to each other scarcely at all. Only sometimes when he came beside her, he gripped her hand in his which was strong and dark. When the berry bucket was full he drew her unresistingly down between the steep hills to the old shanty.

Through these hot summer weeks she felt small need of sleep. When in the half light of the early morning she and Jerry took their milk buckets and went through the yard to the cowlot, she felt awake, alive, a creature of the morning. She thrilled to the feeling of newness, of life born again, that stirs through a summer dawn.

As the summer advanced, an uneasiness that was something other than erotic unrest began to assail her. She tried to dismiss it, to ignore its existence, to lose herself in the old preoccupations. Untiring as a weasel intent upon the blood of chickens, it kept coming back upon her with stealthy persistence. She knew that it was trying to awaken her from her dream. She did not want to be awakened; yet more and more surely she realized that the waking hour was at hand. When she looked into her mirror she met a cool, level gaze looking