He grabbed her hands and forced her to let him go.

She appeared to yield, but as soon as he freed her hands, one of them darted back and touched him. “You’re hard!” she whispered triumphantly. “Oh, Adam! You do burn for me, don’t you?”

“You’re a silly creature,” he declared, his face going red as he turned from her and threw the bridle reins over his horse’s head.

“Very well,” she said meekly. “I’ll be proper—a paragon of every virtue. But oh, it goes against the grain!”

He led her horse to her, and then crouched and cupped his hands to help her mount. She leaned forward quickly and kissed him on the brow. “You see,” she said, looking down at him when she had mounted. “I can be as proper as you please.” He mounted, and they walked the horses out of the glade.

“Such a pretty place,” she said as they left it. In silence they trotted their horses out of the woods and along the edge of a field. Presently Rachel said, “Look, there she is.”

“Clovis Elk?”

“She sees us!”

“It’s all right,” he said.

They looked deliberately away from the woman who stood in the distance by a fenced pen near the barn. Her arms were folded, and she stared in their direction.

“Just to see her makes me shiver,” Rachel said. “She’s like a witch. Mama says never to cross over to her land.”

“We’re only on the edge of it,” Adam said reasonably. “She can’t mind that, can she?”

“She hates us because of what happened,” Rachel said. “It scares me to think of anyone hating us.” She urged her horse to a gallop, and he galloped after her; and a few minutes later they came in sight of the big house on Beulah Land.

3

He had slept all day, or appeared to, his eyes closed, chest rising and falling irregularly, his breath whistling in throat and lungs and then rattling eerily like dry seeds in a gourd. He had taken nothing to eat and only a little water from a spoon, most of it dribbling from his lips onto his high-collared night shirt. Then all of a sudden, at the moment after supper when all of the household had tiptoed quietly into the invalid’s room to pay anxious respects, Felix opened his eyes, stared at them and seemed for a moment to be his own old lucid self. As his gaze passed from Sarah to Leon, and to Penelope and Rachel and Selma in a kind of angry wondering, his eyes then settled on Nell’s face. He tried to raise himself in bed, until Stella caught him to support him, and he said protestingly, “Come to watch me die! Get away! For God’s sake, Nellie, make them go!”