Romeo turned his head to watch them as if he wondered when they would have gathered enough.
"Oh, we do keep you standing, dear, don't we?" Dorothy said, patting his neck as she spoke.
"Oh, you needn't look for sugar," she said, laughing, "for I haven't any with me, but we'll get you some fresh clover."
With Nancy's help she soon had a fine bunch of pink clover for Romeo, and he seemed quite as pleased as if it had been the cubes that he so often enjoyed.
When the party of boys had left the road to cross the fields that lay between them, and the forest at the foot of the mountain, they had believed that they knew exactly how to go to reach the hermit's hut.
The old hermit had been dead for years, but every season the summer guests at the hotels and farmhouses searched all around the deserted hut, expecting to find some relic to take home and label as a bit of the hermit's property.
The boys supposed that they had the woods to themselves, and that they would be uninterrupted in their search of the place.
They did not know that the mountain climbers had taken the same direction, intending, before they enjoyed their lunch beneath the trees, to stop at the old, deserted house.
Mrs. Paxton and little Floretta had worked more persistently than any others of the party, and Mrs. Paxton had found a small, brass button.