“If you’re certain—” Had she been looking at him, she’d have seen his willingness to be pressed further, but her look had already passed on to her husband. “Mr. Kendrick?”

“No, Deborah. Thank you.”

She let a questioning glance suffice for Selma and Leon, waiting for no answering word or gesture, but turning to the door that now opened from the wide center hall. Lovey appeared instead of Myrtis who was serving at table that evening. “Excuse me, everybody, but, Miss Deb, you better come with me. That girl Clovis crying and carrying on. I don’t know how to say it.”

Before anyone could rise and pull back her chair, Deborah was out of it and swept from the room, Lovey close behind her.

Leon sat mummified with fear.

Bonard looked about and laughed. “Something always stirring with the nigras!” Selma decided that Bonard was ordinary after all. He laughed too often, and his laugh was common. But he was good-looking. With his hair worn long and his slim, graceful hands, he might almost have been a girl.

When Deborah and Lovey reached the kitchen, they found only Cook and Myrtis and Pauline. “Where is she?” Lovey demanded.

Cook spoke. “Said she felt sick, so I told her to go on, and she went.”

Lovey turned in astonishment to Deborah. “Hollering her head off, she was, about how she gone take an ax to Roscoe Elk, and he never to my knowledge so much as looked her way!”

“Well, whatever was wrong is apparently over,” Deborah said. To Myrtis she said, “Clear the table and serve the blancmange.”

Myrtis and Clovis had been sharing the serving the last few days because Flossie, the woman who usually attended to the dining room, had cut one of her hands on a broken fruit jar as she worked with Cook and Pauline putting up peach preserves. The appearance of Clovis in the dining room embarrassed Leon, especially as it seemed to him she paused overlong after serving him from a dish before going on to the next place.

Her pauses were not so marked as to attract anyone else’s attention, but they were deliberate. She’d been surprised when he stopped meeting her. Her pride was hurt, and besides, she had enjoyed their times together. She put herself in his way a time or two, but he ignored her. The pauses were meant to punish him as well as tempt him again, but they had gone unheeded, and she had begun to look about for another likely partner.

There were always those she might have, but after the master’s son, and being rewarded with money too, she was vain and looked higher than the ordinary buck who worked in the fields and seldom bathed. It was therefore natural for her to recall the response she had seen in Roscoe’s eyes.