My mother being laid upon her mattress, I bowed and made to retire from the chamber.

“Octavian,” said Mr. Gitney, “you sat.”

I inclined my head and awaited reproach.

“You require no instruction in this matter . . . to sit before guests . . . it disrespects them and the house.”

“I plead my fever, sir.”

“You are a rational being. Your fever is but a state. . . . The sole mitigation I can summon is that you did not sit in a chair which might have been occupied by a guest, but settled upon the floor.”

My mother moaned from her pallet.

“There is no time for the wanted objurgation,” said Mr. Gitney, frowning. I knew not his word, and hesitated; he, perceiving my fault, explained its meaning and derivation while my mother begged for water. He bade me return to the dance and take up my fiddle again, and so I stepped out of the chamber, he kneeling beside my mother to minister to her.

My spirits flagged with the exhaustion of illness; their mute disorder rendered more uncomfortable by awareness of hostile suspicion all around me, fear at my mother’s state, and, finally, by a confused sense that Bono had been exiled groundlessly. Circumstanced thus, my thoughts were not of the most acute, but moved with a bewildered sluggishness; and for some moments I stood outside in the dark of the yard, engaged in attempts to collect my wits before returning to my task.

The voices of the younger of the Young Men burst into the night; and the laughter of damsels; a youth yelling, “There is the Negro boy.”

They approached, pulling each other by sleeve and hand. “Search up and down the house,” said the youth to me. “Find us blindfolds.”

I did not move, but regarded him with astonishment.

“Now,” said he.

“Six,” said a girl.

“We will have hiding.”

“And forfeits.”

“And blunders.”

“I like a game to grant favors.”

“And kisses.”

I nodded. My spirits were all in a ferment. I thought on Bono; I thought on his final scene with me.

I walked away from them into the night.

“Boy?” one of them called.

“Mr. Gitney has requested . . . I should . . . ” I said to them, and bowed, too weak to complete the excuse; and so I continued my retreat.

I fled to the garden; I fled to the stone Bono had marked out for me to worship.

The night was filled with wind, the orchard with motion. Dimly I heard calling behind me.

I fell upon my knees and scrabbled at the dirt around the stone. He had bade me pray to it, and in hasty wise, I did: hollers for my mother’s safety, for Bono’s own, pled silently within.

He had told me to lift the stone, and so recalling, I drew it forth from its socket. The dirt beneath was rich and marbled with the white roots of those plants which grow in darkness.

There lay on the dirt a ring of keys.

I blinked and reached forth to touch them.

Bono had, I ascertained, connived to secrete them when we had removed to this house from the town; having no use for them upon his exile, he had left them for me.

I drew them forth.

Once the surge of excitation had passed from my frame — his gesture in leaving them as sure as a hand upon my shoulder from that most solicitous of mentors — I revolved plans in my head of some future escape. Now that I had in my possession these keys, I might slip from the house with my mother, when she was well, and together we might run for —

My fancy convolved places of flight.

But there, my plan suffered, and I recognized that this was why Bono had not himself fled, all regions being hostile, freedom being found nowhere. In a house such as this, in all events, no key was necessary for exit. The doors were not often locked, and we frequently were sent out by night to the shed or the yard, and might at such times slip away, and our absence remain unnoticed until the next morning.

He had, I supposed, used them to assure himself of the freedom of the house; even more, for the defiance of knowing he had the liberty of motion, unknown to his masters.

Still, it was a gift from he whom I worshipped most in this world; and I determined that my mother and I should benefit from it.

And so I slipped the keys within my waistcoat pocket and returned to the house to find blindfolds for the guests.