"Have not you had sleep enough?" he asked. "Would not dinner be an improvement?"
Wilfred wakened from his dreams of Acland's Hut. Aunt Miriam and Pe-na-Koam had got strangely jumbled together; but up he jumped to grasp his new friend's warm, young hand, and wondered what had happened. He felt as if he had been tossing like a ball from one strange scene to another. When he found himself sitting on a real chair, and not on the hard ground, the transition was so great it seemed like another dream.
The room was low, no carpet on the floor, only a few chairs ranged round the stove in the centre; but a real dinner, hot and smoking, was spread on the unpainted deal table.
Mr. De Brunier, with one arm thrown over the back of his chair, was smoking, to recall his lost serenity. An account-book lay beside his unfinished dinner. Sometimes his eye wandered over its long rows of figures, and then for a while he seemed absorbed in mental calculation.
He glanced at Wilfred's thin hands and pinched cheeks.
"Let the boy eat," he said to Gaspé.
As the roast goose vanished from Wilfred's plate the smile returned to his lips and the mirth to his heart. He outdid the hungry hunter of proverbial fame. The pause came at last; he could not quite keep on eating all night, Indian fashion. He really declined the sixth helping Gaspé was pressing upon him.
"No, thanks; I have had a Benjamin's portion—five times as much as you have had—and I am dreadfully obliged to you," said Wilfred, with a bow to Mr. De Brunier; "but there is Yula, that is my dog. May he have these bones?"
"He has had something more than bones already; Chirag fed him when he fed my puppies," put in Gaspé.
"Puppies," repeated Mr. De Brunier. "Dogs, I say."