There was a sighing sound from them. For the first time they noticed there was an old basket on the table. It held their knives, forks, tin cups and plates.

“Carry me.” Easter’s words had no inflection. Again, “Carry me.”

She held out her arms to them, stupidly.

Then Ran MacLain whistled to his dogs.

The girls ran forward all together. Mrs. Gruenwald’s fists rose in the air as if she lifted—no, rather had lowered—a curtain and she began with a bleating sound, “Pa-a-ack—”

“—up your troubles in your old kit bag

And smile, smile, smile!”

The Negroes were making a glorious commotion, all of them came up now, and then Exum escaped them all and ran waving away to the woods, dainty as a loosened rabbit.

“Who was he, that big boy?” Etoile was asking Jinny Love.

“Ran MacLain, slow-poke.”

“What did he want?”

“He’s just waiting on the camp. They’re coming out tomorrow, hunting. I heard all he said to Miss Moody.”

“Did Miss Moody know him?”

“Anybody knows him, and his twin brother too.”

Nina, running up in the front line with the others, sighed—the sigh she gave when she turned in her examination papers at school. Then with each step she felt a defiance of her own. She screamed, “Easter!”

In that passionate instant, when they reached Easter and took her up, many feelings returned to Nina, some joining and some conflicting. At least what had happened to Easter was out in the world, like the table itself. There it remained—mystery, if only for being hard and cruel and, by something Nina felt inside her body, murderous.

Now they had Easter and carried her up to the tent, Mrs. Gruenwald still capering backwards and leading on,

“—in your old kit bag!

Smile, girls-instead-of-boys, that’s the style!”

Miss Lizzie towered along darkly, groaning. She grabbed hold of Little Sister Spights, and said, “Can you brush me off!” She would be taking charge soon, but for now she asked for a place to sit down and a glass of cold water. She did not speak to Marvin yet; he was shoving the watermelons up onto the table.

Their minds could hardly capture it again, the way Easter was standing free in space, then handled and turned over by the blue air itself. Some of them looked back and saw the lake, rimmed around with its wall-within-walls of woods, into which the dark had already come. There were the water wings of Little Sister Spights, floating yet, white as a bird. “I know another Moon Lake,” one girl had said yesterday. “Oh, my child, Moon Lakes are all over the world,” Mrs. Gruenwald had interrupted. “I know of one in Austria . . .” And into each fell a girl, they dared, now, to think.