Leon had not even dozed when he heard Sarah moving about in her bed. He lay still, not wanting to talk to her. Sometimes when she knew him to be awake, she asked a question or made a comment on an event of the day past, and then they would lie in their two beds talking companionably across the dark room to one another. But today, although he had spent it with relatives and friends, he had been master of Beulah Land, their Leon Kendrick, not for a moment any of his own private selves, and so tonight he needed to feel alone in his mind. He let himself remember Lauretta, not the painted, posing creature going to flab who had recently been in residence at Beulah Land, but the independent, laughing, charmingly greedy woman he had loved a night or two in Charleston those many years ago, the two of them making a child that had grown to be Rachel. From that his mind slipped further back to Floyd and their boyhood, to the hot summer days of tall, heavy headed sunflowers, and the creekbank (his mind rejecting any memory of Roman) with the sly, voluptuous Clovis—as she had been then.

In the morning it still rained. Whether independently or by transference of thought, Myrtis had seen fit to provide sweet potato biscuits which they ate with fresh butter and new cane syrup. As Nell enjoyed a hearty meal, Penelope picked at a soggy bit of milk toast and said something about the Lord and gluttony, but nobody minded her.

After breakfast Leon put on boots and spent the rest of the morning in the barns with Floyd, poking about corn cribs and hay lofts and animal stalls. Floyd had set some of the men to sharpening hoes and plows. They worked cheerfully enough after yesterday’s feast, saying in only a half-joking way that they were tired of turkey and: “Won’t it be good when it turns cold enough to kill hogs?”

After noon dinner most of the population of Beulah Land found time to lie down and sleep a while, but Leon was restless. The rain had eased to drizzle when he saddled a horse and turned him toward the Anderson Place. He had not seen Clovis for a week. When he got there, it occurred to him that it was like the first time he had gone, and he sat on his horse in the front yard waiting to be noticed. Presently, he heard a dog bark, and a minute later Clovis emerged from indoors and called, “Get down and come in.”

He had never before been invited by her to enter the house. Always before they had met in the copse or some other remote part of the grounds, but the weather now would keep Clovis indoors. “Is it all right?” he asked.

“He come the day before yesterday. This time of year he don’t be back for a week.”