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stream of dust followed him, pink in the light. Dabney lifted her hand. "Wave, India," she said.
    There was the distance where he still charmed her most—it was strange. Just here, coming now to the Indian mound, was where she really noticed him first—last summer, riding like this with India on Junie and Rob. (Though later, they would go clear to Marmion to sit in the moonlight by the old house and by the river, teasing and playing, when it was fall.) And she looked with joy, as if it marked the pre-eminent place, at the Indian mound topped with trees like a masted green boat on the cottony sea. That he was at this distance obviously not a Fairchild still filled her with an awe that had grown most easily from idle condescension—that made it hard to think of him as he would come closer. Troy, a slow talker, had been the object of little stories and ridicule at the table—then suddenly he was real. She shut her eyes. She saw a blinding light, or else was it a dark cloud—that intensity under her flickering lids? She rode with her eyes shut. Troy Flavin was the overseer. The Fairchilds would die, everybody said, if this happened. But now everybody seemed to be just too busy to die or not.
    He was twice as old as she was now, but that was just a funny accident, thirty-four being twice seventeen, it wouldn't be so later on. When she was as much as twenty-five, he wouldn't be fifty! "Things will probably go on about as they do now," she would hear her mother say. "It isn't as if Dabney was going out of the Delta—like Mary Denis Summers." They would have Marmion, and Troy could manage the two places. "Marmion can't belong to Maureen!" she had cried, when she first asked.
    "Yes—not legally, but really," her father said; he thought it was complicated. So Dabney had said to Maureen, "Look, honey—will you give your house to me?" They had been lying half-asleep together in the hammock after dinner. And Maureen, hanging over her to look at her, her face close above hers, had chosen to smile radiantly. "Yes," she said, "you can have my house-la, and a bite-la of my apple too." Oh, everything
could
be so easy! Virgie Lee, Maureen's mother, was not of sound mind and would have none of Marmion. It might have been more fun to ask George for the Grove, and see ... but too late now, and the Grove was not the grandest place. Troy had simply slapped his hand on his saddle when she told him, at the way she could have Marmion with a little airy remark! She had blushed—surely that was flattery! Troy was slow on words.
    "I don't hear anything but nice things about Troy," everybody was telling her. As though he were invisible, and only she had seen him! She thought of him proudly (he was right back of the mound now, she knew), a dark thundercloud, his slowness rumbling and his laugh flickering through in bright flashes; any "nice thing" would sound absurd—as if you were talking about a cousin, or a friend. Later they would laugh together about this. Uncle George would be on her side. He would treat it as if it wasn't any side, which would make it better—make it perfect ... unless he got on Troy's side. He liked Troy....
    "There goes Pinchy, trying to come through," said India, to make Dabney open her eyes. Sure enough, there went Pinchy wandering in the cotton rows, Roxie's helper, not speaking to them at all but giving up every moment to seeking.
    "I hope she comes through soon." Dabney frowned.
    "I forgot the onions, too."
    "Hyacinths, you mean."
    "Onions. You're crazy as a June bug now, Dabney," said India thoughtfully. "Will I be like you?"
    "You're crazy the way you forget things, onions or hyacinths either."
    Troy was far to the right now—they had turned. They rode around the blue shadow of the Indian mound, and he was behind her. Faintly she could hear his busy shout, "Sylvanus! Sylvanus!"
    "All the Fairchilds forget things," said India, beginning to gallop joyfully, making the wine