“They’re safe if they never got cold to the touch and you didn’t joggle ’em too much.  Do either you or Miss Rutherford happen to er—­er—­kick in your sleep?”

“We do not!” I answered with dignity, as I snipped away a dead branch of ivy from across the path.

“I just thought Miss Rutherford might from—­”

“You don’t know Bess; she’s so executive that—­”

“That she wouldn’t kick eggs for anything,” finished Pan, mockingly.  “She does pretty well in the Russian ballet, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, I wish you could just see her in the ’Cloud Wisp’!” I exclaimed, with the greatest pride, for Bess Rutherford has nothing to envy Pavlova about.

“I have—­er—­have a great desire to so behold her at some future time,” answered Pan, with one of his eery laughs, and I could almost see hoofs through the raw hide of his shoes.  I would have ruffled the red crests off of the tips of his ears to see if they really were pointed if he had not stood just out of reach of my hand, where it would have been impossible to catch him if I tried.

“You won’t eat with me in civilization, you won’t meet any of my friends, and I don’t believe you ever want to please me,” I said as I turned away from his provocation and began again with the scissors.

“I don’t like world girls,” he said with the fluty coo in his voice that always calms the Ladies Leghorn when they are ruffled.  “I only love farm women.  The moon is beginning to get a rise out of the setting sun, and let’s go away from these haunts of men to our own woods home.  Come along!” As he spoke Pan pocketed his long knife, picked up his stick and bundle, and began to pad away through the trees down towards the spring, with me at his shoulder, and for the first time he held my hand in his as I followed in my usual squaw style.

In all the long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world.  All during the days that never seemed to end, as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.

“And it’s the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear,” said Adam as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks with their smoldering green fire between.  “You know you’d rather be eating this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than—­than dancing that ‘Cloud Drift’ in town with Matthew Berry—­or Baldwin the enemy.”

“Yes,” I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick and tasted the juice of the pot off the end.  “But it would be hard to make Matthew believe it.  I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who wouldn’t know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean.  Poor Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself.”