A meteorite and a bitten hand

The narrator reopens the question of whether Cathy was a monster, then returns to her waiting out the pregnancy, huge only in the belly, stealing the carpenters' chalk to crush between her teeth. At the well rig Samuel's drill hits something at thirty feet that mangles the steel; he guesses a meteorite and imagines the night it fell. Lee gallops up: the baby is coming, and on the ride in he says the house tastes wrong to him and that this is less a birth than "a bitter, deadly combat". Samuel takes charge, tears the blankets off the windows, sends Adam out, and meets Cathy's murderous eyes; asked how she got the scar, she fastens her teeth into his hand and he has to choke her off. The birth is quick — twin boys — and she will not look at them. Liza is fetched, scrubs the house and takes the babies in hand. A fortnight later Cathy dresses to travel, tells Adam to throw the boys in one of his wells, and shoots him through the shoulder.

The buried meteorite and the birth are set side by side in one afternoon, both dug out of the ground on the loveliest day of the year. Cathy's face changing "like one magic-lantern slide taking the place of another" is shown to the one man who had already talked himself out of what he saw. The last line does the damage: the babies have been crying the whole time.