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don’t make any noise.”
    When he had slipped through the window Judith got out of bed. In the moonlight she groped for her clothes. But she could not put up her hair as the slave-girl had done and she was unwilling to pin it in somber braids again, so she stepped across the window-sill with it blowing loose on her shoulders.
    “Philip!” she whispered.
    He caught her in his arms. “How lovely you are with your hair down! I never knew you had such hair.”
    Before she could look back she felt herself put on a horse and Philip was leaping up behind her. He thrust a gun into her hands.
    “You hold it ready, Judith. There may be Indians in the forest.”
    The horse started. Without speaking again they rode into a wood that closed darkly around them as they went. Judith held the gun in her left hand and put her arm around his neck. They went down a weird trail between the oaks, and they were still riding when the moon set on the other side of the forest. Judith could see nothing but the black trees and hear nothing but the clatter of the horse’s hoofs, and she wondered where he was taking her, but as she felt the support of Philip’s arm around her waist and his cheek against hers she knew he could not possibly take her anywhere that she would not want to go.

Chapter Two
    B lack Tibby knelt before the fireplace, reaching into the pot with a long-handled iron spoon. She brought up a dip of gumbo and examined it.
    “Dinner nigh about done, young miss.”
    The odor filled the cabin, rich with suggestions of shrimp and chicken, okra and bay leaf and thyme. Judith sat on the edge of the bed pretending to mend a rent in a shirt of Philip’s, but her hands were so damp that the cloth clung to them and her seam was crooked as a little girl’s. The sun poked fingers of hot light through the chinks between the logs and poured through the windows to make blinding splotches on the floor. In the fireplace the flames licked around the pot, scorching Judith’s face although she had huddled herself on the farthest corner of the bed. She felt sick and dizzy with the heat; a dull ache throbbed at the back of her head and she could feel perspiration trickling down her thighs.
    She held her under lip between her teeth and bit on it hard. The pain gave her something beside the heat to think about. She was repeating to herself, over and over, “I am not going to faint. I am not going to faint. If I start fainting in June I will probably die in August. I am not going to faint.”
    Why hadn’t somebody told her it was going to be like this? Six weeks it had been now since she reached Louisiana, and for five of them the sky had been like a cup of brass turned down over the forest that Philip proudly called “the plantation.” The sun came up with a blistering glory so beautiful that sometimes for a little while one could forget its intensity, but it moved across the sky with a torrent of fire which there was no escaping. Then when evening came the sun tumbled down again into the river, leaving streaks of purple and red to be blotted out by the dark. But even at night the heat still pressed down with a weight that made the covering of a sheet unbearable, and she tossed about until the moss mattress under her was wet and she fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, to be wakened again by that pitiless sun pushing between the logs.
    Even when it rained the coolness was brief and one paid for it afterward, for when the sun came out again the ground began to steam and the air was so thick one could hardly breathe. Sometimes when she remembered the gentle summers of Connecticut Judith cried with homesickness. But she tried not to let Philip know. Philip was so splendid and adoring; it would hurt him if he knew she cried. Philip minded the heat no more than he minded the grasshoppers that leaped away as the trees of the Ardeith forest fell under the strokes of the axes, and Judith knew he would find it impossible to believe that sometimes she really