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lemon while you're at it, and blanch me the almonds. I'm going to let Laura pound me the almonds in the mortar and pestle."
    "Is that very hard?" asked Laura, running out for a drink at the water cooler.
    Ellen was breaking and separating the fourteen eggs. "Yes, I do want coconut," she murmured. For Ellen's hope for Dabney, that had to lie in something, some secret nest, lay in George's happiness. He had married "beneath" him too, in Tempe's unvarying word. When he got home from the war he married, in the middle of one spring night, little Robbie Reid, Old Man Swanson's granddaughter, who had grown up in the town of Fairchild's to work in Fairchild's Store.
    She beat the egg whites and began creaming the sugar and butter, and saying a word from time to time to Laura who hung on the table and watched her, she felt busily consoled for the loss of Dabney to Troy Flavin by the happiness of George lost to Robbie. She remembered, as if she vigorously worked the memory up out of the mixture, a picnic at the Grove—the old place—an exuberant night in the spring before—it was not long after the death of Annie Laurie down in Jackson. Robbie had tantalizingly let herself be chased and had jumped in the river with George in after her, everybody screaming from where they lay. Dalliance, pure play, George was after that night—he was enchanted with his wife, he made it plain then. They were in moonlight. With great splashing he took her dress and petticoat off in the water, flung them out on the willow bushes, and carried her up screaming in her very teddies, her lost ribbon in his teeth, and the shining water running down her kicking legs and flying off her heels as she screamed and buried her face in his chest, laughing too, proud too.
    The sisters'—Jim Allen's and Primrose's—garden ran right down to the water there—how could they have known their brother George would some day carry a dripping girl out of the river and fling her down thrashing and laughing on a bed of their darling sweet peas, pulling vines and all down on her? George flung himself down by her too and threw his wet arm out and drew her onto his fast-breathing chest. They lay there smiling and worn out, but twined together—appealing, shining in moonlight, and almost—somehow—threatening, Ellen felt. They were so boldly happy, with Dabney and Shelley there, with Primrose and Jim Allen trembling for their sweet peas if not daring to think of George's life risked, and India seizing the opportunity of running up and sprinkling them with pomegranate flowers and handfuls of grass to tickle them. Dabney had brought young Dickie Boy Featherstone along that night; they had sat timidly holding hands on the river bank, Dabney with a clover chain circling and festooning her like a net. They had chided Robbie, she had endangered George—he could not swim well for a wound of war. But no one can stare back more languorously and alluringly than a rescued woman, Ellen believed, from the memory of Robbie's slumbrous eyes and surfeited little smile as she lay on George's wet arm. George was delighted as by some passing transformation in her, speaking some word to her and making her look away toward them overcome with merriment—as if she had beguiled him in some obvious way he found absurd and endearing—as if she had tried to arouse his jealousy, for instance, by flirting with another man.
    As Ellen put in the nutmeg and the grated lemon rind she diligently assumed George's happiness, seeing it in the Fairchild aspects of exuberance and satiety; if it was unabashed, it was the best part true. But—adding the milk, the egg whites, the flour, carefully and alternately as Mashula's recipe said—she could be diligent and still not wholly sure—never wholly. She loved George too dearly herself to seek her knowledge of him through the family attitude, keen and subtle as that was—just as she loved Dabney too much to see