And the tinker’s smile won. Bit by bit Patsy’s rigid attitude of condemnation relaxed; the comradeship crept back in her eyes, the smile to her lips. “Heigho! ’Tis a bad bargain ye can’t make the best of. But mind one thing, Master Touchstone! Ye’ll find the right road to Arden this time or ye and the duke’s daughter will part company—for all Willie Shakespeare wrote it otherwise.”
He nodded. “We can ask the way ’s we go. But first we’ll be gettin’ the lady’s-slippers and some breakfast. You’ll see—I’ll find them both for you, lass”; and he set off with his swinging stride straight across country, wagging his head wisely. Patsy fell in behind him, and the road was soon out of sight and earshot.
It was just about this time that the storekeeper at Lebanon got the Green County sheriff on the ’phone, and squared his conscience. “I cal’ate she’s the guilty party,” were his closing remarks. “She’d never ha’ lighted out o’ this ’ere town afore Christian folks were out o’ bed ef she hadn’t had somethin’ takin’ her. And what’s more, she’s keepin’ bad company.”
And so it came about that all the time the sorrel mare was being harnessed into the runabout the tinker was leading Patsy farther afield. And so it came to pass that when the mare’s heels were raising the dust on the road between Lebanon and Arden, they were following a forest brook, deeper and deeper, into the woods.
They found it the most cheery, neighborly, and comfortable kind of a brook, the quiet and well-contained sort that one could step at will from bank to bank, and see with half an eye what a prime favorite it was among its neighbors. Patsy and the tinker marked how close things huddled to it, even creeping on to cover stones and gravel stretches; there were moss and ferns and little, clinging things, like baby’s-breath and linnea. The major part of the bird population was bathing in the sunnier pools, soberly or with wild hilarity, according to disposition.
The tinker knew them all, calling to them in friendly fashion, at which they always answered back. Patsy listened silently, wrapped in the delight and beauty of it. On went the brook—dancing here in a broken patch of sunshine—quieting there between the banks of rock-fern and columbine, to better paint their prettiness; and all the while singing one farther and farther into the woods. She was just wondering if there could be anything lovelier than this when the tinker stopped, still and tense as a pointer. She craned her head and looked beyond him—looked to where the woods broke, leaving for a few feet a thinly shaded growth of beech and maple. The sunlight sifted through in great, unbroken patches of gold, falling on the beds of fern and moss and—yes, there they were, the promised lady’s-slippers.
A little, indrawn sigh of ecstasy from Patsy caused the tinker to turn about. “Then you’re not hatin’ gold when you find it growin’ green that-a-way?” he chuckled.
Patsy shook her head with vehemence. “Never! And wouldn’t it be grand if nature could be gathering it all up from everywhere and spinning it over again into the likes of those! In the name o’ Saint Francis, do ye suppose if the English poets had laid their two eyes to anything so beautiful as what’s yonder they’d ever have gone so daffy over daffodils?”
“They never would,” agreed the tinker.