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slashed my face with a rapier—”
    “You got that scar in a duel , Philip?” she asked reproachfully.
    “Yes, honey child, and if I’d only slashed his face I don’t suppose I’d be on the river now, but I’m afraid I must confess to you that I ripped him open from his belly to his collarbone—”
    “ Philip! ”
    “He died three days later in a great deal of agony, and after that I simply had to leave. So when I heard King George was rewarding soldiers of the French war with grants of land in Louisiana I asked for mine. It’s on the Dalroy bluff—”
    “The Dalroy bluff? That’s where my father’s grant is too.”
    “We’re both fortunate. It’s choice land. But how could I go to it without plows or slaves or money to buy them?”
    “So you—” She paused questioningly.
    “So I went out and got what I had to have,” he said, “from ships bringing to the houses of older sons on the Carolina coast things they had bought but didn’t need. Then we got Bonylegs’ treasure and I quit the sea. I stole everything I’ve got, but it’s only about as much as my patrimony might have been were I not punished for the crime of having been born later than my brother.” He leaned over and looked at her searchingly. “Do you think I’m hopelessly wicked, Judith?”
    She put her forehead on her hands. “I don’t know! I always thought people should do their duty in the state to which God had called them. I’m all mixed up.”
    “Look,” said Philip. He was spreading a map on her knees, and the lace at his wrist covered New England as his finger pointed to Louisiana. “Here is the river, and here, four days’ journey above New Orleans, is the Dalroy bluff. Three thousand acres of the richest land on this continent are waiting there for you and me. Such a home we will have!—orange groves and fields of indigo, and its name will be Ardeith Plantation—all the way down I’ve thought of what I would name it. Do you like that?”
    “It’s beautiful,” said Judith, and thought feebly of her immortal soul.
    “We’ll build a manor,” Philip went on, “and have a city of slaves in the cabins behind it. Our house will be made of clay and this gray Spanish moss plastered over cypress lathes. Clay is more durable than wood and keeps out the heat. We’ll have a double line of oaks leading to the door, and before we’re old they’ll be vast and spreading like these in the forest, with long draperies of moss brushing our shoulders as we ride underneath. You’ll be a great lady, Judith. We’ll found a dynasty, you and I, and a hundred years from now the rulers of Ardeith will be proud to remember us, first of the house, who came down the river together.”
    Judith stood up slowly, catching her hands across her breast. She looked around at the oranges and palmettoes, the dark pomegranate trees and the creeping seductive river, as though she were seeing them for the first time. With a protesting movement she put her hands over her eyes, seeing too the little white house among the hills of corn and herself a little girl on the doorstep working a sampler that said “Thou God Seest Me, Judith Sheramy, July 4, 1768,” three letters in red cross-stitch every morning before she could go out to play. She remembered the cruel beauty of storms and trees etched as though in ink against the bitter sky, and knew with sudden nostalgia that she would never see snowdrifts again, nor icicles a yard long hanging from the eaves, nor the parson giving thanks for the coming of a cold timid April on the hills. Slowly she took her hands off her eyes and looked at Philip, recalling through an enormous distance the words of the royal governor that the king’s soldiers were going to found another New England on the river.
    Philip, who had stood watching her, seemed to understand what she was thinking. He took her hands in his and came very close, saying simply:
    “Tomorrow if the boatmen are right we should come to the port that