"You have seen him, then?" cried Judy.
"With your gone eye!" exclaimed Tim. "Which way? And what signs have you got?"
"Flowers, beetles, snail-shells, caterpillars—anything beautiful is a sign, you know," went on Judy, breathlessly.
"Deep, tender, kind and beautiful," interposed the Tramp, laying the accent significantly on the first adjective, as if for Weeden's special benefit.
WEEDEN looked up. "Sounds like my garden things," he said darkly, more to himself than to the others. He gazed down into the hole he had been digging. The moist earth glistened in the sunlight. He sniffed the sweet, rich odour of it, and scratched his head in the same spot as before—just beneath the peak of his speckled cap. His nose wrinkled up. Then he looked again into the faces, turning his single eye slowly upon each in turn. The Tramp's remark had reached his cautious brain.
"There's no sayin' where anybody sich as you describe him to be might hide hisself a day like this," he observed deliberately, his optic ranging the sunny landscape with approval. "I never saw sich a beautiful day before—not like to-day. It's endless sort of. Seems to me as if I'd been at this 'ole for weeks."
He paused. The others waited. WEEDEN was going to say something real any moment now, they felt.
"No hurry," the Tramp reminded him. "Everything's light and careless, and so are we. There is no longer any Time—to lose."
His voice half sang, half chanted in the slow, windy way he had, and the Gardener looked up as if a falling apple had struck him on the head. He shifted from one leg to the other; he seemed excited, moved. His single eye was opened—to the sun. He looked as if his body was full of light.
"You was the singer, was you?" he asked wonderingly, the tone low and quiet. "It was you I heard a-singin'—jest as dawn broke!" He scratched his head again. "And me thinkin' all the time it was a bird!" he added to himself.