In fact Stheno cared, and deeply, but Sinope had put herself well beyond reach of his caring, and he knew it as well as anyone else.  He had seen her, but he had not spoken with her, far less been alone with her, since the night she had disrupted the service and fled the hall.  It had been his initial impulse to pursue her and comfort her, but even as he had turned to do this he had been aware of his ambivalence, and he had not struggled as hard as he might have against the restraining hands of those about him.  Ever since, he had been tormenting himself with a sense of worthlessness.  He felt he had let her down.  Throughout the hot and claustrophobic week he worked furiously in the fields by day, and could not bring himself to sit near her or even look at her in the hall at suppertime.  Each evening he returned to his parents' solidly ornate house at the western end of the valley, loathing himself for his cowardice and them for their respectability, not answering their probing questions, and thinking only of Sinope in that little house at the other end of the valley.  Each evening the domestic atmosphere about him grew a little worse, but his mood was such that for some nights he thought himself the sole cause and perceiver of the invisible strain.  It was only after the white giant's violent rush through the valley that he realized that his mood was not merely personal nor just heartache.  But it was no consolation for him to realize that, on the very eve of the ceremony of the Last Sheaf, the Commonwealth of Scarbloom was on the point of breaking down.

This was forcibly brought home to him by the bizarre behavior of his grandmother, the revered Altoclyse.  The old lady was the very epitome of propriety.  She was impossible to love, but he had always entertained a fearful respect for her.  For many decades her life had been religiously profound and as regular as a clock.  And so her failure to be in the hall that chaotic evening was somehow more deeply disturbing than any other single event of the day, including the appearance of the white giant.  It seemed to him like a serving of notice on the former natural order of things.  However, further shocks were in store.  Later, after lingering on a while at the supper table with several anxious friends, he returned home to find his parents trying to restrain Altoclyse, who had gone raving mad.  The old lady was struggling with them and screaming the most terrible blasphemies against Great Men, against Scarbloom, and against her entire life, which she denounced as having been uselessly dedicated to a pack of lies.  Not even the subsequent arrival.of Cerolus, in an unprecedentedly foul mood himself, did anything to calm her down.  She raged far into the night, and fell quiet only when completely exhausted.  Stheno did not sleep at all; he lay fully dressed on his bed all night, and the ceremony of the Last Sheaf, only a few hours away, did not seem very important at all when compared with the invisible madness which seemed to be descending on their lives out of nowhere.