"Are you afraid to come?"
"Why should I be?"
"Well, there's Love—in the garden," he was daring—his sparkling eyes tried to hold hers and failed.
She was looking straight beyond him to where Randy stood by a window, tall and thin with his Indian profile, and his high-held head.
"We are going to have watermelons in a minute," was her romantic response to Dalton's fire. "You'd better stay and eat some."
"I don't want to eat. And if you aren't afraid you'll come."
Calvin and Mandy and their son, John, with Flippins' Daisy, had assembled the watermelons on a long table out-of-doors. Above the table on the branch of a tree was hung an old ship's lantern brought by Admiral Meredith to his friend, the Judge. It gave a faint but steady light, and showed the pink and green and white of the fruit,
the dusky faces of the servants as they cut and sliced, and handed plates to the eager and waiting guests.
Becky, standing back in the shadows with Randy by her side, watched the men surge towards the table, and retire with their loads of lusciousness. Grinning boys were up to their ears in juice, girls, bare-armed and bare-necked, reached for plates held teasingly aloft. It was all rather innocently bacchanal—a picture which for Becky had an absolutely impersonal quality. She had entertained her guests as she had eaten her dinner, outwardly doing the normal and conventional thing, while her mind was chaotic. This jumble of people on the lawn seemed unreal and detached. The only real people in the world were herself and Dalton.
"How did you happen to ask us?" Randy was saying.