The lad flushed with pleasure, and vainly tried to keep the bare feet of which he was so conscious out of sight in the hay upon the barn floor, where, for this brief moment, he dared to linger. Dorothy saw the movement and laughingly thrust forth her own pink toes, fresh from an ablution in the trough, and from which she had had to permanently discard her ragged ties.
"That's nothing. We're both the same. Anyway, a barefooted boy came to be president! Think of that. President James Barlow, of the United States! I salute you, Excellency, and request the honor of your sharing my brown-bread-and-treacle!"
Then she laughed, as she had not done for many days; from the sheer delight of life and the beautiful world around her. For it was beautiful, that first June day, despite the ugly cottage which blotted the landscape and the sordid implements of labor all about.
To his own amazement, the orphan farm boy laughed with her, as he did not know he could, as he surely never had before. This girl's coming had opened a new world to him. She had commended his ambition and made light of the difficulties in way of its achievement. She had assured him that "learning is easy as easy!" and she knew such a lot! She didn't scorn him because he was uncouth and ill-clad; and—Well, at that moment he was distinctly glad that she was barefooted like himself.
Recklessly forgetting that he was "using the time I was hired for"—the hire being board and lodging, only—he dropped down on the step and watched as she ate, so daintily that he could think of nothing but the sparrows on the ground. And as she ate she also talked; which in itself was wonderful. For he—Well, he couldn't talk and eat at the same time. It was an accomplishment far beyond him, one that had never been taught at the table of Miranda Stott. She not only chattered away but she made him chatter, too, now, in this unwonted freedom from his mistress's eye.
"Who's 'him'? Why, he's hern," he explained. "Her son, you know."
"No, I don't know. I know nothing—except that I'm a stolen little girl who's lost everybody, everything in the world she loves!" cried poor Dorothy, suddenly overcome in the midst of her gayety by the thought of her own sorrows.
Jim had never known girls and their ways, but he had the innate masculine dread of tears, and by the look of Dorothy's brown eyes he saw that tears portended. To change the subject, he answered her question definitely:
"He's the man what brought you here. That's him. He's hern."
"That man—Smith? He here? In the cottage yonder? Then—good-bye!"