They accepted his joy in them as their due and saw it blend with his joy in the morning. It had been but a little while since Annie had thought that if she darkened her eyes with her hand the sun went out and all the earth was in darkness. Suddenly a redbird made a solitary peal of song, a rich modulation from the three high whistled notes to the low throaty altos of the decline where the singing darkened to meet the brush and undergrowth of the thicket. The song set the hilltop clear in a high relief. “I sometimes plow this-here, but mainly I leave it in pasture grass.” Beyond the fence the earth rolled gently up to a summit that held a few scattered trees, an oak and two or three thorns. “And on the top, right there on the summit, is where I expect to be buried, right there. Off to the left of the oak but on the summit like. From that-there spot you can see—it’s curious now—you can see the whole farm, every last field. You can look down on the house and the barns and right down this-here valley to the creek. It’s curious. There’s where I expect to be buried some day. I always like family buryen-grounds. I expect to lay down my bones right there on this hilltop.” The hill-crest rolled in a fair curve against the sky between the limits of the trees, but it slipped beyond the trees again and sank away into the curving field, and Theodosia felt a quick pleasure in it as the place where he would be buried, and felt it as the summit of the farm that looked down upon all the fields and the meanderings of the creek and the life of the barns, on the singing mockingbird and the goodness of the day. Her eagerness ran forward and longed to have him buried there, anticipated his entombment on the brow of the hill he had chosen, so that she could scarcely wait for the consummation of his wish. She looked at him happily and smiled, and he took her hand in some unconscious delight, and thus they walked up the fence path. * * * * * Theodosia would watch the long brown hand with its yellow shadowed nails when Lucas passed a plate of some food at her side. While she helped herself to a serving her eyes would cling to the hand where it folded at the edge of the plate, the thumb near the food, and she would remember the baby on the quilt in Aunt Deesie’s yard. An exquisite disgust of the hand would make the food taste doubly sweet in her mouth when the hand was withdrawn. “Well, Ladybug,” Tom Singleton said when they had passed to the portico, “what’s the best thing in the world?”