“I already question Floyd with his father there, and Floyd say one time—”

“I find it hard to believe, and harder to understand. We surely can’t let him marry this girl.”

“No, ma’am. I couldn’t stand that, nor could his papa. But that ain’t all. I don’t know if I ought to say or not, or even if I can.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Lovey, say.” Deborah was so completely alerted by now to an expectancy of bad news that her mind had leaped beyond Lovey’s revelations.

“She must be lying, Miss Deb,” Lovey mumbled, “but she say—she say she been with our Leon.”

Nothing like it had ever before happened at Beulah Land. Deborah opened the door, and Lovey followed on her heels, although she stopped short at the door to Leon’s room when Deborah opened it and entered without knocking.

Leon was sitting at his desk with a shallow wooden tray full of arrowheads that had been turned up over the years by the plantation plowmen. They had turned up hundreds, and these were only the best he had saved. Lovey waited in the hall; her ears cocked to the crack of the door.

Turning and seeing his mother, Leon rose from his chair. “What is it, Mama? Is anything wrong? You look so—”

“You must tell me if anything is wrong.”

Leon, who had all but forgotten, or put out of his mind, the late summer’s adventure and its possible consequences, knew instantly that this must have to do with Clovis.

His feeling was justified when Deborah said, “You know the girl, Clovis?”

Leon nodded, unable to speak. She had told. The bad girl had told on him.

“Lovey tells me she is pregnant.” Leon stared at his mother’s hands. “Clovis has been persuaded to name the possible father.” He could look at nothing but her hands, each rapidly and cruelly massaging the other. “Floyd has admitted that he was with the girl, but she says that you also have been with her. Is it so? Tell me the truth. If what she says is a lie, I shall sell her instantly, and that will be the end of it.”

“Did Floyd say I had?” Leon asked.

“Tell me!” Deborah demanded.

“Yes.”

Deborah slapped the boy so hard he almost fell. At the sound of it Lovey rushed into the room and went straight to Leon. Although he was now taller than she, she put her arms around him protectively so that he seemed smaller than she, a child again. “Don’t hit this boy again!” she said angrily. “He needs helping, not hurting!”