She sat down and took off her shoes.
While he measured her shoe against Steve's foot, she slipped her feet into a broken pair of green-hide covers clamped with nails that Donald had made.
"They will be right for him," he said. "I'll waken him now and we'll get on our way."
She took the bread that had been browning on the hearth stones and put it on the table. The hut was filled with the warm, sweet smell of the newly-baked loaves.
"You can change in here while I put Davey to sleep outside," she said. "And there's a pail of water and soap there by the doorway; it will do you no harm to dowse with it."
The tall man laughed. It was a boyish burst, that laugh of his. The piece of advice, womanly in its essence, and delivered with an air of maternal solicitude, touched a forgotten well-spring of merriment.
Mary lifted Davey into her arms, and sang to him softly as she walked up and down in the sunshine.
A long, straggling figure came to her a few moments later, clad in Donald's clothes. She smiled to see the way they hung short of his ankles, hitched over the long, thin legs. But the dowsing of creek water had done more than cleanse his body; in an indefinable way it had purified and stimulated the inner man. He had found Donald's shears, too, and had clipped the shaggy growth about his chin to a modest beard, and shorn his head of some of its shock of hair.
"You have the air of a daffy young Englishman just arrived in the Colonies to make your fortune," she said.
"Ma'am, isn't that what I am?"