They looked at each other with the teasing, saucy stare of two children; then they laughed as care-free and as merrily.
“Maybe you’ll get your wish,” he suggested, soberly.
“Maybe I will,” agreed Patsy, with mock solemnity.
A look of shrewdness sprang into the tinker’s face. “But you said you hated gold. You couldn’t marry a king’s son ’thout havin’ gold—lots of it.”
“Aye—but I could! Couldn’t I be making him throw it away before ever I’d marry him?” And Patsy clapped her hands triumphantly.
“An’ you’d marry him—poor?” The tinker’s eyes kindled suddenly, as he asked it—for all the world as if her answer might have a meaning for him.
Patsy never noticed. She was looking past him—into the indistinguishable wood-tangle beyond. “Sure, we wouldn’t be poor. We’d be blessed with nothing—that’s all!”
For those golden moments of romancing Patsy’s quest was forgotten; they might have reached Arden and despatched her errand, for all the worriment their loitering caused her. As for the tinker, if he had either a mission or a destination he gave no sign for her to reckon by.
They dallied over the breakfast; they dallied over the aftermath of picking up and putting away and stamping out the charred twigs and embers; and then they dallied over the memory of it all. Patsy spun a hundred threads of fancy into tales about the forest, while the tinker called the thickets about them full of birds, and whistled their songs antiphonally with them.