She came drowsily awake, but before she was fully herself her feet were on the floor and she was rubbing her heavy eyes. The sun was streaming in.
"I've blazed the fire an' het me up some coffee," he said, still in that impersonal way which was so disturbing only because it was not his way. "I've harnessed up. I'm goin' to the street. You remember where that Brahma stole her nest? I've got to have two eggs for even dozens."
"Up in the high mow," said Tira. "Right under the beam."
She heard him go out through the shed, and she followed, to the kitchen, slowly, with the squalid feeling that comes of sleeping in one's day clothes, and there she found the fire low and his cup and plate on the bare table. She could see him through the window. There was the horse, hitched to the staple in the corner of the barn, there was the basket of eggs on the ground waiting for its even dozens.
"D'you find any?" she called.
He did not answer, and she ran out to the barn and called up to the mow:
"You there? You find any?"
But the barn, in its soft darkness, with a beam of dusty light here and there, knew nothing about him. He had not climbed to the mow, for the ladder was on the other side of the barn floor. She lifted it, brought it over, set it against the hay and climbed. She was broad awake now, and her taut muscles obeyed and liked it. She stepped on the hay, found the dark hole old Brahma chose for her secret hoarding place, and put in her hand, once, twice. Three eggs! Brahma must have thought she was pretty smart to lay three without having them stolen away from her. Tira put the eggs carefully in her apron pocket and hurried down the ladder, and out to the basket waiting on the ground. How many eggs did he want to make even dozens? Did he tell her? She could not remember. Probably he had forgotten himself, by now. She sat down on the step and took the eggs out in her lap, and then began to count and put them back again. The sun lay on them and they looked pretty to her in their brown fairness. She liked them, she thought, as she counted, liked all the farm things, the touch of them, the smell. Even old Charlie, standing there, smelled of the barn, and that was good, too. Five dozen, that was it, and one over. She put the extra egg in her pocket, got up and carried the basket to the wagon, placing it in front where it could sit safely between Tenney's feet. And at that minute Tenney himself came round the corner from the front of the house, and the day was so kind and the sun so warm on her face that it seemed a long time ago she had thought he meant to send her away, and she called to him:
"You might git a quarter o' tea, the kind they call English breakfast. An' a half a dozen lemons. It's terrible hard to think up any kind of a pie these days, 'twixt hay an' grass."
"Tea," said Tenney, as if he were putting it down in his mind. "An' lemons. You might go out, in a half an hour or so, an' look at that calf."