“Miss Nell up with Mister Felix. Miss Pea, Miss Selma in the dining room finishing their breakfast. Mister Adam Davis rode over while ago like he happened by and begged Miss Rachel to ride with him.” She grunted. “Planned it between them, you ask me. Off she went without her breakfast. Foolishness.” When he stepped to the back door, she said, “Now where you going to?”

“Out to the barn.”

The frost had melted away, and a row of icicles suspended from the rope pulley over the well nearest the big house dripped in an almost steady flow. Leon found Joe-Tom outside the cow barn. He helped the boy finish dressing the squirrels, and he tried a joke or two with him, but the pleasure had gone out of the morning. When he drew guts from the body of a squirrel and threw them over the fence into the chicken run, a big red rooster came running to claim them, and the hens scattered out of his way, squawking simulated alarm.

2

Their ride had taken them to the very glade which Roman and Proctor had once used as a private meeting place, where Sarah and Casey Troy had become lovers, and where Sarah had been attacked by Alonzo Elk, now more than seven years in his grave. They did not know, of course, what had happened there and, indeed, considered that they had discovered it. Dismounted, they strolled hand in hand, Rachel holding Adam’s tightly, her fingers alternating with his.

“Can you really wait until I’m eighteen in October?” she said, not for the first or the tenth or the last time.

“Well—” He frowned, seeming to consider it. “I must, mustn’t I? They’ve said you have to be eighteen before we can marry.”

“I don’t know why!” Rachel exclaimed. “Lots of girls marry at fifteen and sixteen. Annabel was just seventeen when she married Blair Saxon.”

“Annabel was said to be exceptionally mature for her age.”

“I admit only that she was as silly and vain at seventeen as she is today.”

Adam whooped with laughter. “I shall tell her you said so!”

“Don’t bother. I shall tell her myself one day, but not until I am married, and we are equals at last.”

“That won’t make you equal, you know. She’s already a mother twice over.”

“So shall I be—and more times too.”

“Her children will always be older than yours.”

“Ours will be smarter and better looking.” He smiled. “Did you hear what I said? I said ours. Our children! Doesn’t that raise goose bumps?”

He shrugged and tried not to smile again, although all that she said and did pleased him. “Everyone has children, so I suppose we shall too.”

She pulled her hand from his. “You are hateful! You have no more feeling than a flea!”

“Are you so certain fleas are not swept by passion too?”

“Do you think they are?”