“Is he coming to live at Elmnest?” asked Adam, in a voice of entire unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.

“He is not,” I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason for.

“Sooner or later, Woman, you’ll have to take a mate,” was the primitive statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.

“Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply.  I mean a born rustic.  I couldn’t risk an amateur with the farm after all you’ve taught me,” I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it had taken Pan several attempts to teach me.  Pan never talks when he eats, and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points of his ears.

“Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?” he asked as he set his bowl down after polishing it out with his last chunk of bread some minutes after I had so finished up mine.

“Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I have had less than a good half-night’s sleep every morning?” I asked as I crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.

    “I await my beloved in
    Grain fields. 
    Come, woman! 
    In thy eyes is truth. 
    Thy body must give food with
    Sweat of labor, and thy lips
    Hold drink for love thirst. 
    I am thy child. 
    I am thy mate. 
    Come!”

Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.

“I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe’s lambkins,” I whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and repeated the croon in his.

    “I am thy child. 
    I am thy mate. 
    Oh, come!”

again chanted Pan, and it surely wasn’t imagination that made me think that the red crests ruffled in the wind.  The light in his eyes was unlike anything I had ever seen; it smouldered and flamed like the embers under the pot beside the rock.  It drew me until the sleeve of my smock brushed his sleeve of gray flannel.  His arms hovered, but didn’t quite enclose me.

“And the way I am going to feel about all the little chickens out of the incubator,” I added slowly as if the admission was being drawn out of me.  Still the arms hovered, the crests ruffled, and the eyes searched down into the depths of me, which had so lately been plowed and harrowed and sown with a new and productive flower.