“You naidn’t lift a finger, my darling.  I don’t afford and won’t have a sairvant in the camp, so I should sairve you myself.”

Passing over this argument, Eva crept up on the stretcher and had him lift her to the ground.  Her shape was very slender and elegant, and when the two passed each an arm across the other’s back to walk together school-girl fashion, Adam’s grasp sloped far downward.  She did not quite reach his shoulder.

They made coffee, and served up their dinner in various pieces of pottery.  The baked muskalunge was portioned upon two plates and surrounded with stewed potato.  Potatoes with scorched jackets, enclosing their own utmost fragrance, also came out of the ashes.  Adam poured coffee for Eva into a fragile china cup, and coffee for himself into a tin pint-measure.  The sugar was in a glass fruit-jar, and the cream came directly off a pan in the cold-box.  They had pressed beef in slices, chow-chow through the neck of the bottle, apricot jam in a little white pot, baker’s rolls, and a cracked platter heaped with wild strawberries.  Around the second point of Magog Island, down one whole stony hill-side, those strawberries grew too thick for stepping.  The hugest, most deadly sweet of cultivated berries could not match them.  You ate in them the light of the sky and the ancient life of the mountain.

“I never was so hungry at home,” said Eva, accepting a finely-done bit of fish with which her lord fed her as a nestling.  “Perhaps things taste better eaten out of unmatched crockery and under a roof of leaves.  I wouldn’t have a plate different in the whole camp.”

“Nor would I,” said Adam.

She looked across at the mountain-panorama, for, though stationary, it was also forever changing, and the light of intense and burning noon was different from the humid veil of morning.

“And yonder goes a sail,” she tacked to the end of her mountain-observations.

“Heaven speed it!” responded Adam, carrying his cup for a second filling to the coffee-pot on the stove.  “Will ye have a drop more?”

“Indeed, yes.  I don’t know how many drops more I shall drink.  We get so fierce and reckless about our victuals.  Will it be the spirit of the old counterfeiters who used to inhabit this island entering into us?” suggested Eva, using the English-Canadian idiom of the western provinces.

“Without doot.  It was their custom never to let a body leave this strond alive, and they can only hairm us by making us eat oursels to death.”

“Nearly a hundred years ago, wasn’t it, they lived here and made counterfeit money and drew silly folks in to buy it of them?  When I hear the rocks all over this island sounding hollow like muffled drumming under our feet, I scare myself thinking that gang may be hid hereabouts yet and may come and peep into the tent some night.”

“Behind them all the army of bones they drowned in Magog watther or buried in the island,” laughed Adam.  “It’s not for a few old ghosts we’d take up our pans and kettles and move out of the Gairden of Eden.  I’ll keep you safe from the counterfeiters, my darling, never fear.”