“Oh, it shall have its romance! But some time I’ll tell you—perhaps I will—how I’m not really a clever person at all, but just a savage from outer darkness, who pretends to understand London and Paris and Munich, and gets frightfully scared of them…. Wait! Listen! Hear the mist drip from that tree. Are you nice and drowned?”
“Uh—kind of. But I been worrying about you being soaked.”
“Let me see. Why, your sleeve is wet clear through. This khaki of mine keeps out the water better…. But I don’t mind getting wet. All I mind is being bored. I’d like to run up this hill without a thing on—just feeling the good healthy real mist on my skin. But I’m afraid it isn’t done.”
Mile after mile. Mostly she talked of the boulevards and Pere Dureon, of Debussy and artichokes, in little laughing sentences that sprang like fire out of the dimness of the mist.
Dawn came. From a hilltop they made out the roofs of a town and stopped to wonder at its silence, as though through long ages past no happy footstep had echoed there. The fog lifted. The morning was new-born and clean, and they fairly sang as they clattered up to an old coaching inn and demanded breakfast of an amazed rustic pottering about the inn yard in a smock. He did not know that to a “thrilling” Mr. Wrenn he—or perhaps it was his smock—was the hero in an English melodrama. Nor, doubtless, did the English crisp bacon and eggs which a sleepy housemaid prepared know that they were theater properties. Why, they were English eggs, served at dawn in an English inn—a stone-floored raftered room with a starling hanging in a little cage of withes outside the latticed window. And there were no trippers to bother them! (Mr. Wrenn really used the word “trippers” in his cogitations; he had it from Istra.)
When he informed her of this occult fact she laughed, “You know mighty well, Mouse, that you have a sneaking wish there were one Yankee stranger here to see our glory.”
“I guess that’s right.”
“But maybe I’m just as bad.”
For once their tones had not been those of teacher and pupil, but of comrades. They set out from the inn through the brightening morning like lively boys on a vacation tramp.
The sun crept out, with the warmth and the dust, and Istra’s steps lagged. As they passed the outlying corner of a farm where a straw-stack was secluded in a clump of willows Istra smiled and sighed: “I’m pretty tired, dear. I’m going to sleep in that straw-stack. I’ve always wanted to sleep in a straw-stack. It’s comme il faut for vagabonds in the best set, you know. And one can burrow. Exciting, eh?”