If he could not be with Lucille Christian he would seek out Mr. Munn and ask him question after question. He would want to know what Mr. Munn thought about some case he remembered from his law reading at school, or about some detail of the management of the Tobacco Association, or about some matter of politics, the chances of Senator Tolliver’s election.

  ‘If he’s elected,’ Mr. Christian had once said, overhearing Benton Todd’s question to Mr. Munn, and raising his head from his newspaper, ‘if he’s elected, by God, he’ll never sit in the Senate. I’ll twist his durn head off his neck ——’ And there had been the ripping sound of the newspaper being pulled apart in his hands. Then he had added, ‘With my own hands.’

  More and more the very sight of Benton Todd grew to irritate Mr. Munn. He was a nice boy, Mr. Munn was sure of that, and smart enough, but Mr. Munn blamed his youth, his innocence, and his apparent conviction that you could just go out and set everything right because you were right. His constant questions, and his very air of respect when he asked them, worked upon Mr. Munn’s feelings like a reproach, like an unjust accusation from a trusted friend. But when he saw the boy following Lucille Christian about the house, trying to talk to her as she whisked busily and, Mr. Munn was sure, unnecessarily from room to room, or saw him standing alone, trustingly and somewhat ridiculously, in the middle of the floor where she had left him, with a basket or a pan dangling in his large grasp, he was tempted to stamp out of the house or to protest, to demand why in the world she treated the boy that way, why didn’t she send him about his business if she didn’t love him.

  ‘What do you let him hang round for?’ Mr. Munn demanded of her one night, when she lay beside him in the dark. They had been silent for a long time, staring up at the ceiling.

  ‘Shh!’ she said, and laid a finger on his lips. ‘Don’t yell. You’ll wake up papa, and then where’ll you be?’

  ‘What do you let him hang round for?’ Mr. Munn whispered.

  ‘Who?’ she asked, still keeping her finger lying lightly on his lips and with it tracing their contours.

  ‘You know who,’ he said — ‘Benton Todd.’

  ‘I told him to go away,’ she whispered.

  ‘Well, he hasn’t gone.’

  ‘You’re jealous,’ she murmured, and patted his lips with her finger.

  ‘God, no, I’m not jealous,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, jealous. You’re jealous, and he’s just a kid. And your greatest admirer, too. Why, mention your name and he’s ready to get on his knees; he thinks you hung the moon.’

  ‘I’m not jealous,’ Mr. Munn said deliberately, ‘but it’s not fair to him. I don’t like to see him standing round holding some damned thing in his hand and looking like he didn’t know how it got there.’

  ‘You ought to be glad he’s around to hold things,’ she retorted. ‘If he weren’t around I might get you to hold things for me.’

  ‘That’s not very probable.’

  ‘I’ll bet it’s not very probable,’ she said, ‘but it’s not very sweet and polite of you to say so.’

  They were silent for a time. Her finger remained on his lips. Now and then she moved it a little, parting his lips very lightly.

  ‘It’s not fair to him,’ Mr. Munn whispered.

  ‘Shh,’ she urged, and pressed his lips, although he had only whispered.

  ‘It’s not,’ Mr. Munn repeated. He hesitated: ‘Unless, of course, you do intend to marry him.’

  She giggled softly. Then she said, ‘My, my, Mr. Munn, what high ground you take!’ And she giggled again. Then she stopped suddenly, withdrew her finger from his lips, and remarked, ‘What a pretty picture you paint of everything.’

  ‘Everything ——’

  ‘My being in here, and everything.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ he whispered, ‘you know ——’

  ‘A really good woman,’ she said, ‘would be so insulted she’d jump right out of this bed and go in the other room.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘But I’m not going to,’ she added. ‘It’s too cold.’

  Certainly, Benton Todd was decent enough, and Mr. Munn liked him. Only when Mr. Munn was out at the Christian place did that irritation overpower his ordinary feeling for the boy. Mixed with his liking for Benton Todd there was a certain sense of guilt. The boy had no business mixed up with the Brotherhood for Protection and Control, Mr. Munn was sure, and he felt, obscurely, a responsibility for the boy’s joining. It was that damned simple-minded, hero-worshiping streak in him, Mr. Munn thought, and was uncomfortable that he himself was the object of Benton Todd’s admiration. Now the boy was riding around the country at night, likely to get shot or jailed, because he figured he was saving the nation.

  But Lucille Christian would have to take some of the responsibility, too, he felt. He had felt that for a long time before he was able to see the whole picture. At first he had thought that Benton Todd joined just because he guessed the girl’s sympathies to lie that way, or because he wanted to swagger a little before her and drop dark hints. Then Mr. Munn had decided that Lucille Christian had let slip, somehow, the information that he and Mr. Christian were in the thing. Or perhaps she had come right out with it, either because she was worried about it or because she wanted the boy to get in. But Mr. Munn didn’t know positively how much she knew.

  He discovered that she knew everything, and had known everything for a long time.

  One evening when Mr. Munn was there for supper, Mr. Christian looked up from his plate and remarked: ‘Well, Sukie, you better get Aunt Cassie to sleep up here tomorrow night. I’m going possum-hunting over on Rose Creek, and I won’t get in till mighty late. Like as not I won’t get in till day.’

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  Mr. Christian turned to Mr. Munn. ‘Say, Perse, don’t you want to come? Tom Abernathy’s got two new dogs he claims are mighty good, and we’re gonna try ’em out.’

  ‘I’ve got some things to see to out at the place,’ Mr. Munn answered. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Tomorrow night’s Saturday night, you can catch up on your sleep Sunday morning. Why don’t you come, huh?’

  Lucille Christian, Mr. Munn noticed, was looking half-amusedly from one to the other.

  ‘Can’t do it,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘Why don’t you all stop pretending?’ Lucille Christian asked, so casually that at first Mr. Munn did not grasp the full significance.

  ‘Huh?’ Mr. Christian demanded.

  ‘You’re not fooling anybody,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you stop?’

  ‘Huh!’

  ‘Don’t huh me,’ she told her father, and laughed. ‘You’re not any more going possum-hunting than you’re going to fly to the moon.’

  Mr. Christian held his fork in mid-air, a slice of ham impaled upon it, and stared at his daughter. She was smiling at him. ‘You’re both dirty, low-down, plant-bed-scraping, barn-burning night riders. And then you lie to me about it. That’ — and she took a sip of coffee and with a judicial air set the cup down — ‘makes it worse.’

  ‘Now see here, Sukie ——’ Mr. Christian began.

  ‘Yes, papa?’ she inquired smilingly, as though nothing had happened.

  ‘Now see here. You don’t know a thing. Not a thing. You ——’

  ‘I’d be silly if I didn’t,’ she said. ‘Everybody else does. I bet half the people in the county could just offhand name you twenty-five apiece of the members of whatever high-falutin thing it is you call yourselves. And half of those would name both you all, you, papa, and you, Perse.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Mr. Christian returned, ‘and if all that’s true, how come the sheriff hasn’t been out here long ago to get me? And get Perse, huh?’

  ‘Scared,’ she said, and took another sip of coffee. ‘Plain scared.’ She set the cup down, smiled brightly at them both. ‘He knows that just as soon as you all got put in his jail, a lot of your little playmates would come and take his pleasant little jail apart.’ Then she added, ‘And take him apart, too, maybe.’

  ‘You don’t know a thing,’ Mr. Christian said sourly.

  ‘I know they couldn’t get those men over in Hunter County convicted this fall. After they arrested them. Everybody said the jury was full of night riders.’

  ‘Talk,’ Mr. Christian declared, ‘just talk.’

  She addressed herself to Mr. Munn: ‘Won’t you have some pickled peaches?’ And she held the dish toward him. Then to her father she said: ‘Why don’t you admit it, papa? I know all about it, anyway.’

  ‘You don’t understand. Not a thing.’

  ‘It’s plain, anyway,’ she retorted, and laughed. ‘I don’t mind. I really don’t. That is, if it’s what you’ve got to do.’ She turned serious, and looked directly at her father, whose heavy fist lay on the table with the fork it clutched pointing upward.

  ‘It’s not a thing for womenfolks to be messing in,’ he told her.

  ‘I don’t mind about you,’ she said. ‘If I were a man, I’d probably be in myself.’

  Mr. Munn looked soberly across the table at her. The lamplight falling on her face made the flesh take a golden tinge. He knew that her eyes were blue, but in that light he could not really make out their color, they appeared so dark and deep. ‘If you were in,’ he said slowly, ‘you might not find it very pretty.’

  ‘I wouldn’t expect to,’ she returned. ‘I’m not a child.’

  ‘Pretty!’ Mr. Christian exclaimed, and the haft of the fork he clutched struck hard on the table. ‘Well, it ain’t very pretty either that it’s been ten years since tobacco got a fair price, and the land in this section’s all mortgaged, and half the folks nigh starving. I’d do anything I could lay my hand to. Before God I would, and I don’t care who knows it!’ He scraped his chair back, and rose abruptly to his feet. He said, ‘There comes a time.’

  ‘Sit down, papa,’ Lucille Christian commanded in a different, and quiet, voice. ‘Sit down, and finish your coffee. I know.’

  He sank slowly back into his chair. During the rest of the meal he did not speak another word. Then, afterward, he said that if he was going to be up late the next night he’d better be getting to bed, and clumped upstairs. Mr. Munn and his daughter had followed him into the hall, where he picked up the lamp he would carry up with him. As he mounted the stairs, his posture seemed a little like that of an ageing man. Or perhaps, Mr. Munn thought, it was a trick of the light. He watched Mr. Christian all the way up and out of sight. The shadow cast by the lamp Mr. Christian held moved up the wall beside him, enormous, swaying and bouncing with a soundless and free elasticity as though by its efforts it dragged the man upward, like a dead weight.

  When Mr. Christian had disappeared beyond the head of the stairs, Mr. Munn turned to the girl. ‘Did you get Benton Todd into the night riders?’ he demanded.

  ‘No,’ she answered thoughtfully, studying his face.

  ‘You didn’t tell him about your father being in? Or me?’

  ‘He’s not a fool,’ she said. ‘Everybody else knows, and knew a long time back. And why shouldn’t he? He was around here a lot. And was here nights when you all were off riding.’

  ‘Did he ask you about it?’

  ‘Yes, but I lied to him. I told him I didn’t know anything.’

  ‘You didn’t get him into the night riders? You didn’t encourage him?’ Mr. Munn demanded, leaning toward her.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I tried to keep him out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His father,’ she replied. ‘On account of his father. He’s a nice old man, and papa likes him so much, you know, and he’d resigned from the board, and all. If he ever found out Benton was in the night riders, you know how it would be.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Well ——’ and she hesitated. Then: ‘He’s not much better than a boy.’

  ‘He’s old as you are,’ Mr. Munn said.

  ‘I’m a year older.’

  ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ he insisted.

  ‘People are different,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

  ‘That was the reason?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  He leaned over, slowly, and kissed her. That was one of the moments when the two persons she seemed to him, bafflingly, to be were merged into a single identity. He put his arm around her shoulders, and standing in the unsure light which the lamp gave, with the table cluttered with the dirty dishes behind him, beyond the open door of the dining-room, and with his gaze fixed on the blank wall, he was filled with a joy and certainty which seemed to him, at the moment, final.

  ‘Good Lord!’ she said suddenly, and stepped back from his embrace. ‘Suppose Martha’d come in to get the dishes and see us.’

  ‘Suppose,’ he repeated, with an inflection that made her look questioningly at him.

  ‘Well, it would be a pickle,’ she observed matter-of-factly.

  ‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but you don’t have to have that expression on your face,’ and laughed. ‘Besides’ — and she paused, and regarded him amusedly — ‘if you’ll get it off, I might come down to see you tonight. Even if I do freeze to death getting there.’

  ‘That’s not the point,’ he replied.

  ‘Gratitude’ — she gave a mock sigh and shook her head deprecatorily at an imaginary audience — ‘gratitude and chivalry for you.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ he said.

  He did not know exactly what he had meant. Those two identities which had seemed to merge at the moment when he leaned toward her and kissed her were now quite separate. Again, as before, there were the two people, the one who made jokes with her father and hummed aimless snatches of songs and moved about the household occupations with heels tapping briskly and cheerfully on the expanses of bare board, and the other one who, tonight, would stand just inside the shadowy white door, with her finger to her lips, and then approach his bed. He shook his head.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘But there is.’

  ‘Do you love me?’ he asked.

  The negro woman entered the dining-room and began, clatteringly, to stack up the dishes.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he said.

  ‘Shh,’ she cautioned, her fingers to her lips warningly, and motioned with her head toward the negro woman in the dining-room.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he repeated, his voice the same as before.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but not if you bellow. You’re worse than papa.’

  He had asked her that question before, and every time she had answered it evasively. But he had not mentioned the matter to her for some weeks now. He had begun to learn to accept the situation as it was, as she apparently accepted it, without torturing himself for a final definition of it. But he had only begun to learn, for sometimes, still, when she was lying beside him, or when she was with other people and he caught a sudden inflection of her voice or gesture, or even when he was alone and remembered, as with a stab of surprise, how different his life was from what it had been not long before or from what he had ever guessed it would be, he experienced that appetite for definition, for certainty, that would seize on her promise as on a symbol for everything it demanded. Or rather, in trying to extract her promise, he was like a man who tries to find in the flux and confusion of data some point of reference, no matter how arbitrary, some hypothesis, on which he can base his calculations. But she would promise nothing. Now he had not tried to make her promise for a long time, not since the night when they had stood shivering, side by side, before the window of his room to watch the patch of flame on the dark horizon.

  That night, before they had noticed the fire, he had asked her to marry him, and she had said, ‘Maybe, when the time comes.’

  ‘Don’t you love me?’ he had demanded.

  ‘Yes,’ she had told him.

  ‘Why won’t you promise me, then?’

  ‘No,’ she had said. ‘That’s like making a dare. It would be like daring life.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  ‘It would just be a dare, and I haven’t got the nerve. I just haven’t.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ he repeated. Then he had become aware that she was weeping. She had wept almost silently, but he had felt the bed quivering with the force of her suppressed sobbing. ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter?’ he had demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ she had said.

  He had put his hand on her face to find it wet with tears. ‘Darling, darling, stop it, you must stop it. I didn’t think you were the kind would ever cry about anything. Darling, you mustn’t,’ he had insisted, holding his hand on her face.

  ‘I haven’t cried in years, not years,’ she had managed to say, still sobbing, ‘but I just can’t help it. I can’t.’

  ‘I love you, I love you,’ he had declared. ‘I promise I’ll love you always.’

  ‘Don’t promise’ — and the sobbing had choked her — ‘anything, ever. Promising means time and I don’t want to think about time; I don’t ——’

  ‘Hush, hush,’ he had said.

  Later, moving from the bed toward the door to return to her room, she had hesitated with her face in the direction of the window. ‘Look,’ she had whispered, pointing. He had slipped out of the bed and gone to the window. The night had been unusually dark, the dark mass of the earth scarcely darker than the sky. But a patch of flame had been on the horizon, a single center of rich, cherry-colored glow fading outward and upward into the enormous hollow of darkness. A dog had barked very faintly, very far off.

  Lucille Christian had come to stand beside him. ‘What is it?’ she had whispered.

  He had told her that he did not know, and had drawn her to him. She had shivered as she stood there against him, watching the distant point of light in the darkness.