“Rachel!” Sarah’s voice was sharp as it had never been before when she addressed the girl. “You shall acknowledge it to yourself—if I have to hitch a buggy and drive you to the cemetery in Highboro and show you his grave. You must accept what happened, or you will be ill again.”

Rachel shook her head. “You might show me a dozen graves, but I would still know Adam is alive.”

“How can you say so?” Sarah demanded in angry solicitude.

Rachel smiled. “Because I carry his child inside me. So, he is alive, you see.”

“Do you think it is so?” Edna said.

“Yes, I do,” Sarah said. “I questioned her further. Dr. Platt talked with her, and he is certain of it too. She is nothing like deranged, as I first feared. They came together, she says, for the first time on the day of our spend-the-day, before the harvesting began.”

“It was early August. Well, what are we to do? What are we to do? Doreen?”

“Yes, Grandmama?” Sarah had almost forgotten her, so quietly had the young woman sat as Sarah and Edna talked. “Tell Violet to bring us some coffee and a piece of that light fruit cake she baked as a test for Thanksgiving.”

“Yes, Grandmama.”

Doreen left the little parlor and went straight to the office where she found James and told him what she had heard.

“She must marry me,” James said.

16

The trouble with the idea of a marriage between Rachel Kendrick and James Davis was that it became immediately too popular. Its supporters were ignorant of James’s true feelings—and forgot Rachel’s in considering the practical aspects of the solution to a problem that had seemed insoluble.

James and Adam had been brothers; therefore, Adam’s child would be, properly, a Davis.

The adjoining plantations would one day be united. With James and Rachel married, their double inheritance would eventually go to their sons.

Rachel would not be an unmarried “widow”; her child would be no orphan.

Propriety, so often the victim of the Kendrick family passions, would at last be observed.

With everything so perfectly logical, who could object? Rachel could, and did.

Having started wrong, the thing continued wrong. On the evening of the day of Sarah’s visit to Oaks with her news of Rachel’s pregnancy, Doreen—acting, she thought, for the best—haltingly confided James’s declaration to Edna, who talked it over with Bruce. An hour after supper Edna and Bruce took a buggy ride to Beulah Land where they had an earnest but happily agreeable hour’s consultation with Sarah and Leon, in the office so as not to involve the other ladies of the household. Sarah was, of course, delegated to present the plan to Rachel, which she did the following morning in the gentlest way she could. But even as she spoke, she could hear how brutally “practical” the thing sounded.