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 with the tide.”

“Don’t tell me that you’d rather be up there than here, Caroline.”

“I’d like it for some things,” Mrs. Paine admitted frankly; “you should see the clothes that those Waterman women are wearing.”

“What do you care what they wear.  You don’t want to be like them, do you?”