“Tobey!” Lovey called. The man came over quickly. “Find Floyd and tell him I want him.” Tobey went off at a trot in the direction of the blacksmith shed. Sarah returned to the house and the office where she tried to read again and failed. She had passed from puzzlement through anger and embarrassment and was feeling dead calm when the knock came at the door forty minutes after she had last spoken to Lovey.

“Come in,” she ordered.

The door opened and Roscoe entered, his face showing nothing. “Floyd said you wanted me.”

“Did Plumboy not find you earlier?”

“He found me.”

“Why did you not come then?”

He paused. “He didn’t say there was a hurry about it.”

She allowed a pause to be her comment. “When I went to teach the children this morning, only the youngest were there. Where are the older ones?”

“Working,” he said without hesitation.

“We’ve never expected the children to work.”

“They’re needed. Twelve and thirteen years old is getting beyond ‘children.’”

“And eight and nine and ten?”

Roscoe shrugged. “They wanted to go with the older ones. I got them chopping cotton. The rain made weeds. Every hand is useful today.”

Sarah let another moment pass. “Is Roman chopping cotton and weeding too?”

Roscoe took his time. He knew how to use a pause too. Fixing his eyes on her soberly, he nodded.

“Why?” she said.

“He’s fourteen. Others that age do the work of a man.”

“Roman has been working with me in the school.”

Roscoe smiled.

“That is work too, you know!” As soon as she said it, she regretted letting her anger show.

Roscoe lowered his voice as if he were about to share a secret with her. “I decided he was getting to be too much of a gal-boy and a man’s work would be good for him.”

“You took him away without consulting me.”

Roscoe smiled a rebuke. “Mistress has kept him a child.”

“He has been doing a man’s work for me.”

“Mistress may say so.”

“I want him to continue with that work,” she said in a measured way.

“Surely not!” He laughed, as if what she said was so obviously beyond reason there was no thinking she meant it to be taken seriously.

He continued the laugh until her silence forced him to acknowledge a disadvantage. “Are you telling me that as Overseer I may not assign work to the hands as I see the need?” His voice betrayed him. She had observed him and listened to him carefully during her years at Beulah Land, and she understood that it was only when he was angry that he fell into a way of carefully overenunciating each word and saying it separately, as if he were translating literally from a foreign language.

She kept her voice cool. “I am telling you the children are not to work. Let them go through today, but tomorrow give them no order.”