“De de de de-de-dum,” she hummed, then stopped and looked about her, hating the dusty grass and live oaks, the drying, dying orchard she saw in the distance down the drive; and when she turned her head back, hating the house—that big, ugly, comfortable house that held them all in their smug satisfaction, that house that ever smelled of cooking food and of Negroes, that house with all its comings and goings, and none of it to do with her.

She turned full around and put her hands on her hips as she looked squarely at the house, adversary to adversary. The house was the very heart of Beulah Land, mothering as it did the people whose will, and ambition and conscience meant its continuance. Her anger made fists of her hands. Fists on hips, feet apart, she stood like a mocking gypsy, until her thinking released the knotted anger in her heart, and that released the muscles of her body, making fists hands again, allowing arms to droop and fold comfortably into each other, legs to relax, shoulders to round.

She knew suddenly what was wrong with her, because her angry boredom had given her a picture of what would draw her out of boredom: the arrival of an admirer—of Bruce Davis, in whose power it lay to turn her life in a new direction. He was, God knows, a dull man, but she was—not old enough, but of an age to be ready to appreciate the tamer currents of certainty and abandon the rushing uncertainty of the rapids.

He had been interested—more than lightly involved, nearly hers. Then something had happened. Something certainly had happened—oh, she knew it without knowing what it was. Yesterday when he had stopped with the first report of his son Adam, in Savannah to arrange the final sale and shipping of the cotton of both Oaks and Beulah Land, she had looked at him when he had finished the business side of his report; she had looked at him with a sympathetic, intimate, we-two, half smile—and he had got the look in his eyes of a bolting rabbit. Well, hoppety, hoppety, hop! And goodbye, rabbit stew.

Even as she thought of him, she saw him. She had continued walking away from the house at an angle that presently gave her a partial view of the yards at the back of the house. And there he was, standing near the back door, still holding the reins of his horse—he must have just then arrived—and talking to Rachel. Lauretta was too far away from them to hear even the murmur of voices, and they could not see her because she was in the shade of the live oaks. Not that they appeared to be looking for her!