"Well, then," he said with satisfaction, "let's begin."
Caroline attacked a sandwich, with shining eyes, and when in another minute the boy took from his pocket a tin ring that slipped miraculously out of itself into a jointed cup, and dipped her a mug of hot coffee from the bubbling pail, she realized with a pang of joy that this was, beyond any question, the master moment of her life.
"I take this along," he explained, "so's when I go by, and they're milking, I can have some warm. Anybody'd give me all I want if William Thayer dances and drops dead for 'em. It tastes good early in the morning, I tell you."
She sighed with pleasure. To drink warm milk in the cool, early dawn, with the cows about you, and the long, sweet day free before!
They sipped turn about; the boy divided the orange mathematically; the pie was filled with fruit of the Hesperides.
"That was mighty good, that dinner," he announced luxuriously, "an' now I'll have a pipe."
The pungent, fresh odor of the burning tobacco was sweet in the air; a dreamy content held them quiet.
He did not ask her whence or whither; she had no apologies or regrets. Two vagabonds from every law of home and duty, they were as peaceful and unthoughtful of yesterday's bed and to-morrow's meal as William Thayer, who slept in the sun at their feet.
For long they did not talk. An unspoken comprehension, an essential comradeship, filled the deep spaces of silence that frighten and irritate those whom only custom has associated; and Caroline, flat on her filled stomach, her nose in the grass, was close in thought and vague well-being to the boy who puffed blue rings toward the little river, his head on his arms.
"I put the plate into that door in the barn," he said, finally. "Did you put those silver things back?"