She helped him to the foot of the tree and he dropped down beside it with a weakness that made him hunch his shoulders in disgust.
"I have something better than carrots," she said. "Please sit here and I will get it."
She hurried across the little meadow to a deeper shade of thick-growing jack pines on the farther side, and the man turned his head to follow her movements with his eyes. Her beauty was twisting at something in his heart. A long time ago he had known someone like her. The slim figure, walking swiftly across the open, took him back twenty years, and he could almost hear a sweet voice calling his name, and in a place very much like this, with the coolness of the wilderness all about and the sun shining through the trees. His hand touched the scrub of beard on his face and he shivered. The thought came to him that the girl was afraid of him and was running away. As she disappeared among the banksians he reached for one of the raw carrots and began to eat it.
Mona returned so quietly that he did not hear her until she was at his side. She brought a basket and a small pail of cold spring-water. She spread a napkin on his lap and loaded it with the contents of the basket. He was sensitively conscious of her eyes upon him and he tried not to appear ravenous as he began with meat and bread.
"I'm spoiling your picnic, child," he said, speaking to her feebly like a man who was very old. "I'm sorry."
"You're not spoiling it," she cried, leaning toward him with a gesture full of sweet tenderness. "Oh, I have been so happy today—God has made me happier by bringing me here in time to help you!"
"Happy," he whispered, as if to himself. "It is wonderful to be happy. I have known—what it is."
It was her struggle to appear natural now as he ate. She had never been so intimately close to starvation and pathos and weakness in man.
"Were you lost?" she asked.