"I came from a long way," she said briefly. "I was—I was taking a walk. Where do you live? Don't you ever to go bed?"
The man chuckled.
"I have been feeling adventures in my bones all day," he said, "and here they are; a child and a cat. If you will come with me, Mademoiselle, I will show you where I live."
He led the way gravely to the dim, white object, and Caroline perceived it to be a tent, pitched by the side of a spring that poured through a tiny pipe set into the rock. The tent flap was tied back, and she saw inside it a narrow cot, covered with a coarse blue blanket, a roughly made table, spread with a game of solitaire, and a small leather trunk. On the further side of the tent there smoked, in a rude, improvised oven of stones, a dying fire. Above it, under a shelf nailed to the tree, hung a few simple utensils; two or three large stumps had been hacked into the semblance of seats.
To one of these stumps the man led Caroline, and, seating her, he turned to the shelf above the fire and fumbled among the pots and pans there, producing finally a buttered roll, a piece of maple sugar, and a small fruit tart.
"You must be hungry," he said simply, and Caroline ate greedily. After he had brought her a tin cup of the spring water, he selected a brown pipe from a half dozen on the shelf and began filling it from a leather pouch that hung on the tree.
"Now let's hear all about it," he said easily.
"I am running away," said Caroline abruptly. At that moment it really seemed that she had planned her flight from the hour that left her, tear-stained and disgraced, in her little bed.
"They didn't treat you well?" he suggested, picking out a red ember from the coals on the point of a knife and applying it to the pipe.
"I'm not to wear my knickers any more," Caroline said, with a gulp, "and my bathing suit has to have a skirt. I've got to stop p-playing with the b-boys—so much, that is," she added, honestly.