routine and brief.

Farther from the house, the grounds looked better kept than they were. It was fortunate that the blue grass of the planet Pamplin grew short and neat, for Lauria never would have been able to keep the ten acres of her property trimmed. But the big trees that shaded the grounds had dropped twigs and leaves that she wouldn't clear away until the big effort of the fall clean-up.

The path curved down past a small cleared area in which a dozen upright wooden markers were spaced in rows. This was the cemetery.

She paused to look out across the neat rows of markers. There were men buried there. Twelve young men. They had died by her hand, in accordance with the Constitution and the law.

At one end of the cemetery stood a large wooden plaque on which she had carved the Constitution of Pamplin. Many times had her mother explained the meaning of the Constitution to Lauria, when Lauria was a little girl and still intruding on her mother's privacy.

"The people who colonized Pamplin left Earth many years ago because there they always had to sacrifice some of their individual rights to some government," her mother had said. "There are many kinds of governments, but all of them try to regulate people. And to regulate people, they have to invade people's privacy.

"The people of Pamplin came to this world because we don't want any government. We believe that every man and woman should have his individual right to do as he pleases, without other people bothering him."

"But what does No. 4 mean, Mother?" Lauria had asked. "'Only the brave deserve the fair?'"

"That means," replied her mother, for Lauria was fourteen and deserved to know these things, "that a woman on Pamplin is not subservient to the whims of men. No man may approach her and take her in his arms unless he has fought his way through the defenses of her home. Then they may agree to share the home, if they wish, but no woman of any character will permit a man to do this until he has proved his valor by fighting his way to her."

"Then my father must have been a brave man, wasn't he, Mother?"

"Yes, he was, my dear," said her mother, smiling tenderly. "He was very persuasive, too."

Lauria never saw her father, and no other man invaded the privacy of her mother's home 

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