I'm hungry. Dinner is surely late tonight. Suppose you look for Her?
TOBY-DOG
I daren't. She forbade it. She is down there in the hollow, with a big basket. The dew is falling and wetting her feet and the sun's going away. But you know how She is. She sits on the damp ground, looking ahead of her, as if She were asleep—or lies flat on her stomach, whistling and watching an ant in the grass ... She tears up a handful of wild thyme and smells it, or calls the tomtits and the jays—who never come to her by any chance. She takes a heavy watering pot and—ugh! it gives me the shivers—pours thousands of icy, silvery threads over the roses or into the hollows of those little stone troughs, 'way back in the woods. I always look in to see the head of a brindle-bull who comes to meet me and to drink up the pictures of the leaves, but She pulls me back by the collar with: "Toby, Toby, that water is for the birds." ... Then She takes out her knife and opens nuts, fifty, a hundred nuts, and forgets the time ... There's no end to the things She does.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE, (slyly)
And what do you do all that time?
TOBY-DOG
I—well—I just wait for her.
KIKI-THE-DEMURE
I admire you!