cause he is homesick."

Randy raised himself on his elbow and smiled at his listening
audience--and as he smiled he was aware of a change in Mary Flippin.
The brooding look was gone. She was leaning forward, lips
parted--"Then you think that he is--homesick?"

"I don't _think_. I know. Why, over there, my bones actually ached
for Virginia."

The Judge raised his coffee cup. "Virginia, God bless her," he
murmured, and drank it down!

The Flippins moved on presently--the slender mulatto trailing after
them.

"If the Flippins don't send that Daisy back to Washington," Mrs. Paine
remarked, "she'll spoil all the negroes on the place."

Mrs. Beaufort agreed, "I don't know what we are coming to. Did you see
her high heels and tight skirt?"

"Once upon a time," the Judge declaimed, "black wenches like that wore
red handkerchiefs on their heads and went barefoot. But the world
moves, and some day when we have white servants wished on us, we'll
pray to God to send our black ones back."

Calvin was passing things expertly. Randy smiled at Becky as he filled
her plate.

"Hungry?"

"Ravenous."

"You don't look it."

"Don't I?"

"No. You're not a bread and butter sort of person."

"What kind am I?"

"Sugar and spice and everything nice."

"Did you learn to say such things in France?"

"Haven't I always said them?"

"Not in quite the same way. You've grown up, Randy. You seem _years_
older."

"Do you like me--older?"

"Of course." There was warmth in her voice but no coquetry. "What a
silly thing to ask, Randy."

Calvin, having served the lunch, ate his own particular feast of
chicken backs and necks under the surrey from a pasteboard box cover.
Having thus separated himself as it were from those he served, he was
at his ease. He knew his place and was happy in it.

Mary Flippin also knew her place. But she was not happy. She sat
higher up on the hill with her child asleep in her arms, and looked
down on the Judge's party. Except for an accident of birth, she might
be sitting now among them. Would she ever sit among them? Would her
little daughter, Fidelity?

III

"We are the only one of the old families who are eating lunch out of a
basket," said Caroline Paine; "next year we shall have to go to the
Country Club with the rest of them."

"I shall never go to the Country Club," said Judge Bannister, "as long
as there is a nigger to fry chicken for me."

"We may have to swim wit