"You might finish those beans," said she, offering the hoe. "Of course, you must stay to dinner, and I must go light the fire."
Bob finished the beans, leaned the hoe up against the house, and went around to the front. There he stopped in astonishment.
"Well, you have changed things!" he cried.
The stuffy little shed kitchen was no longer occupied. A floor had been laid between the bases of four huge trees, and walls enclosing three sides to the height of about eight feet had been erected. The affair had no roof. Inside these three walls were the stove, the kitchen table, the shelves and utensils of cooking. Miss Thorne, her sunbonnet laid aside from her glossy black braids, moved swiftly and easily here and there in this charming stage-set of a kitchen. About ten feet in front of it, on the pine needles, stood the dining table, set with white.
The girl nodded brightly to Bob.
"Finished?" she inquired. She pointed to the water pail: "There's a useful task for willing hands."
Bob filled the pail, and set it brimming on the section of cedar log which seemed to be its appointed resting place.
"Thank you," said the girl. Bob leaned against the tree and watched her as she moved here and there about the varied business of cooking. Every few minutes she would stop and look upward through the cool shadows of the trees, like a bird drinking. At times she burst into snatches of song, so brief as to be unrecognizable.
"Do you like sticks in your food?" she asked Bob, as though suddenly remembering his presence, "and pine needles, and the husks of pine nuts, and other débris? because that's what the breezes and trees and naughty little squirrels are always raining down on me."