IN THE SHADOW
but insufficient to face the danger with coolness when it arrives.
She slipped unseen from the rear of the house, crossed the park of live oaks, skirted the edge of a meadow where a herd of mules was grazing, and came out finally upon the main canal. This waterway was the great feeder, the aorta of the wonderful vascular system which supplied the rice fields which stretched away as far as the eye could reach. The canal was a small river; some boats were moored to the bank and the presence of these suggested to Virginia that it would be rather nice to row. It was a quarter of a mile to the next trunk; there the canal skirted a strip of piney woods, "high land," as it was locally called. Ten feet above the level of the marsh constitutes high land in the rice belt.
Virginia loosed the boat and picked up the oars, laughing to herself at the awkwardness of the whole craft; nevertheless she pulled easily along the bank and reached the other end breathless and glowing, her supple young muscles throbbing from the weight of the clumsy oars. Eric, her dog, had ambled along the bank whimpering his disapproval of the irregular proceeding.
Virginia had never visited this especial spot and decided to explore. She climbed the bank, reached the shelter of the trees, and then cried out with pleasure at the view. Even from that slight elevation her line of vision was much extended, and as she gazed out across the vast tract of rice lands, interspersed with patches of wooded "high land" her heart swelled with the pride of possession. The thought that all, as far as she could see, belonged to Manning and herself; the great granaries which it filled, the thousands which it fed, the revenues,
272
