"You used to be a Kipling fiend," said Adam, one morning, when they had been salting the cattle, and were resting before going home. "Didn't he write a Jungle tale about 'How Fear Came'? He ought to be here now to write another to show how Fear might go."
"It seems to me he did," Robin answered, running her fingers through the short, curly forelock of a colt that stood placidly licking her hand. "I wonder that they don't remember longer, or perhaps they know that we think they are folks. Really, I think we ought to hold a reception, a kind of salon, once a week, so as to keep acquainted with our neighbors."
"You are an absurd child," he said, laughing; "but does that mean that you have really decided to go on living?"
"I don't know," she said. "What did we determine? By the way, which side of this question are you on?"
"Both," he said decidedly.
"Oh! then we can't do like those men Cooper told about, in 'The Pioneers,' wasn't it? who argued and argued every night until at last they convinced each other, and then started in to argue it out again."
"No," he answered, "I rather think that we are answering ourselves rather than each other, anyhow. Robin, where was 'the land of Nod'?"
"That is one of the questions that I was sent to bed for asking a preacher who was visiting at our house, when I was about seven years old. They hurried me hence before he had a chance to answer, so I never found out. But I know what you are thinking of, and I have thought of it too. Perhaps there isn't any land of Nod, or any land at all. And I have thought, also, how it would be if one of us died and left the other with little children. You might take my body and jump off the rock, but you couldn't take them too, and still less could you leave them."
"I have thought of the risk to you," he said, "and felt that not even for the sake of a child would I let you come so near death."
She laughed a little. "That is really funny," she said. "You must have been reading Michelet; I never thought of that at all. I am very well and strong, and my habits and my clothes are not such as to hamper my life nor endanger that of another. There is next to no risk, so far as that is concerned, certainly none I would not gladly take. But I have dreaded afterwards, when the child might fall ill and need help that we could not give it."