"She wanted somebody to come," Linnet said slowly. "She wanted a woman in the house. So it would be fitting. So she wouldn't be sent away."
"I expect that's some of it."
"Only some?"
He looked at her sidelong, and for a moment she thought he was going to say something hard. Instead he said, "Miss Rudd, you've read those letters. I haven't. You tell me if that's all of it."
She looked down at the case on her knees. She thought of the letter from the eleventh of May, the shortest one, that had asked her to write about something ordinary. She thought of the letter in June that had asked her, with what she had taken for a man's shy clumsiness, what her mother had been like, and whether you ever stopped expecting a person to come in at the door. She had written back three pages about her mother. She had said that you did not stop, not really, but that after a while you began to be glad when you forgot for an hour, instead of guilty. The answer, in July, had said only: Thank you. I needed someone to tell me that. I have been very guilty.
She had thought it was Caleb grieving for the horse. She had thought him tender-hearted. She had loved him a little for it.
"No," she said. "That isn't all of it."
They came to the Morgan place an hour before sundown. It was as the letters had described it, which hurt more than she had expected: the log house with its board addition, the barn, the corrals, the spring with a little shingled house built over it, the creek down below in its cottonwoods. Smoke was coming from the chimney. There was a wash line between two posts with a man's shirts on it and a girl's calico dress and a dish towel. And on the rise behind the house, where the grass ran up to the skyline, there was a small rectangle of fence made of peeled poles, and inside it a mound already grassed over, and at the head of the mound a board.
Nehemiah stopped the wagon in the yard. He did not get down at once. He sat holding the lines and looking at the house, and Linnet understood that he was afraid, and that it was not the girl he was afraid of.