She wandered on, intoxicated with the mild, spacious night, the dewy freedom of the fields, the delicious pressure of the warm, velvet air against her body. Red Rufus purred as he went, rejoicing with his vagabond comrade. Just how or when she began to know that she was not asleep, just why the knowledge did not alarm her, it would be hard to say. But when the truth came to her, the friendly, powdered stars had been above her long enough to accustom her to their winking; the tiny, tentative noises of the night had sounded in her ears till they comforted and reassured her; the vast and empty field stretches meant only freedom and exhilaration. In a sudden delirium of joy she slipped between the bars of a rolling meadow and ran at full speed down its long, grassy slope, her nightgown streaming behind her, her slender, childish legs white as ivory against the greenish-black all around her. Beside her bounded the great cat with shining, gemlike eyes. They rolled down the last reaches of the slope, and all the Milky Way wondered at them, but never a sound broke the solemn quiet of the night: the ecstasy was noiseless.
Caroline danced, bowing and posturing in a bewitched abandon, around the tinkling, glistening fountain.
Her face buried in sweet clover, she panted, prone on the grass.
"Let's go right on, Rufus, and run away, and do just as we please!" she whispered to the nestling cat. "If I can't do like the boys do, I don't want to stay home—the fellows laugh at me! I'd rather be whipped than sent to bed like a girl. I won't be a young lady—I won't!"
Rufus purred approvingly.
"If I only had some trousers!" she mourned, softly; "a boy can do anything!"
Across the quiet night there cut a thin, shrill cry: a little, fretful pipe that brought instantly before the mind some hushed, white room with a shaded light and a tiny basket bed. Caroline sat up and stared about her: such cries did not come from open fields. Hardly a stone's throw from her there was a small knoll, and behind it what might have been a large, projecting boulder suddenly flashed into red light and showed itself for a dormer window; a cottage had evidently hidden behind the little hill. Curiously Caroline approached it and walked softly up the knoll.
Almost on the top she paused and peered into the unshaded window. These householders had no fear of peeping neighbors, for only the moon and the night moths found them out, and the simple bedroom was framed like some old naïve interior, realistic with the tremendous realism of the Great Artist.