Afterward, when the others had gone down to the house for coffee and the cake that Keziah had made and Mrs. Dimmock had criticized, Linnet stayed on the rise for a while by herself. The grass was coming up very green, the way the letter in May had said it would. You could see the kitchen window from here; she had not thought of that before. You could see the new shelves through it, and the coffee tin on the end of the top one, empty now and meant to stay that way.
Nehemiah came back up the slope after a while. He stood a little way off, the way he had on the platform that first day, as if she were a horse he did not want to startle.
"Miss Rudd," he said. "I'd like to ask you something, and I want you to know before I ask it that no is a good answer and I won't hold it against you or bring it up again."
She waited.
"I'd like to write to you," he said.
She looked at him. "Mr. Morgan, I live eleven miles away. You see me every Sunday evening."
"I know it." He turned his hat once around by the brim. "That's not what I mean. I mean I'd like to write to you myself. In my own hand. Kez has been teaching me, Saturdays, in the wagon, with a slate. I've got so I can do it, slow. My spelling's a disgrace." He was looking at the stone. "Everything you ever got from this house came through somebody else. I don't want that. If there's ever going to be anything between you and me, and I'm not saying there will be, I'd want you to have something that's only me, even if it's poor. And I'd want you to have time to read it and think about it, and not have it sprung on you. Like he said."
The wind moved in the grass. Down at the house someone opened the kitchen door and laughter came out and the door closed again.