d in
silence. Between the sun at her back and the fire on her face, she
grew pleasantly drowsy; the sounds about her melted imperceptibly to
a soft, rhythmic drone; her head drooped forward....

"Hello, hello!"

She jumped and stared at the boy and the dog. For a moment she
forgot. Then she welcomed them heartily and listened proudly to his
admiring reception of her preparations.

"Well, William Thayer, will you look at that! How's this for a
surprise? And see what we've got." He balanced a tin pail carefully
between the two crossed sticks in the heart of the fire, and
unfolded from a newspaper two wedges of pumpkin-pie. In William
Thayer's little basket was a large piece of cheese.

"It's coffee 'n milk mixed together; they had bottles of it," he
explained. "William Thayer 'll take back the pail. Are you hungry?"

Caroline nodded.

"Awful," she stated briefly.

"Well, then," he said with satisfaction, "let's begin."

Caroline attacked a sandwich, with shining eyes, and when in another
minute the boy took from his pocket a tin ring that slipped
miraculously out of itself into a jointed cup, and dipped her a mug
of hot coffee from the bubbling pail, she realized with a pang of
joy that this was, beyond any question, the master moment of her
life.

"I take this along," he explained, "so's when I go by, and they're
milking, I can have some warm. Anybody'd give me all I want if
William Thayer dances and drops dead for 'em. It tastes good early
in the morning, I tell you."

She sighed with pleasure. To drink warm milk in the cool, early
dawn, with the cows about you, and the long, sweet day free before!

They sipped turn about; the boy divided the orange mathematically;
the pie was filled with fruit of the Hesperides.

"That was mighty good, that dinner," he announced luxuriously, "an'
now I'll have a pipe."

The pungent, fresh odor of the burning tobacco was sweet in the air;
a dreamy content held them quiet.

He did not ask her whence or whither; she had no apologies or
regrets. Two vagabonds from every law of home and duty, they were as
peaceful and unthoughtful of yesterday's bed and to-morrow's meal as
William Thayer, who slept in the sun at their feet.

For long they did not talk. An unspoken comprehension, an essential
comradeship, filled the deep spaces of silence that frighten and
irritate those whom only custom has associated; and Caroline, flat
on her filled stomach, her nose in the grass, was