Her presence made this whole happening seem more in the nature of things. They were glad Miss Lizzie had come! It was somehow for this that they had given those yells for Miss Lizzie as Camp Mother. Under her gaze the Boy Scout’s actions seemed to lose a good deal of significance. He was reduced almost to a nuisance—a mosquito, with a mosquito’s proboscis. “Get him off her,” Miss Lizzie repeated, in her rich and yet careless, almost humorous voice, knowing it was no good. “Ah, get him off her.” She stood hugging the other little girls, several of them, warmly. Her gaze only hardened on Jinny Love; they hugged her all the more.

She loved them. It seemed the harder it was to get out here and the harder a time she found them having, the better she appreciated them. They remembered now—while the Boy Scout still drove up and down on Easter’s muddy back—how they were always getting ready for Miss Lizzie; the tents even now were straight and the ground picked up and raked for her, and the tea for supper was already made and sitting in a tub in the lake; and sure enough, the niggers’ dog had barked at the car just as always, and now here she was. She could have stopped everything; and she hadn’t stopped it. Even her opening protests seemed now like part of things—what she was supposed to say. Several of the little girls looked up at Miss Lizzie instead of at what was on the table. Her powdered lips flickered, her eye-lids hooded her gaze, but she was there.

On the table, the Boy Scout spat, and took a fresh appraisal of Easter. He reached for a hold on her hair and pulled her head back. No longer were her lips faintly parted—her mouth was open. It gaped. So did his. He dropped her, the head with its suddenness bowed again on its cheek, and he started again.

“Easter’s dead! Easter’s d—” cried Gertrude Bowles in a rowdy voice, and she was slapped rowdily across the mouth to cut off the word, by Miss Lizzie’s hand.

Jinny Love, with a persistence they had not dreamed of, deployed the towel. Could it be owing to Jinny Love’s always being on the right side that Easter mustn’t dare die and bring all this to a stop? Nina thought, It’s I that’s thinking. Easter’s not thinking at all. And while not thinking, she is not dead, but unconscious, which is even harder to be. Easter had come among them and had held herself untouchable and intact. Of course, for one little touch could smirch her, make her fall so far, so deep:—Except that by that time they were all saying the nigger deliberately poked her off in the water, meant her to drown.

“Don’t touch her,” they said tenderly to one another.