“Just so.”
He went among the larches, gathered an armful of dead wood, and returned to the fire. Lynette was kneeling and poking it with a stick, her hair shining in the sunlight, her pale face with its hazel eyes full of a happy seriousness. Canterton knelt down beside her, and they began to feed the fire.
“Rather sulky.”
“Blow, daddy.”
He bent down and played Æolus, getting red in the face.
“I say, what a lot of work these fairies give us!”
“But won’t they be pleased! I like to think of them coming out in the moonlight, and feasting, and then having their dance round the ring.”
“And singing, ‘Long live Lynette.’”
They heated up the water in the saucepan, and made tea—of a kind—and baked the potatoes in the embers of the fire. Lynette always spread the feast on the bottom of a bank near the fairy ring. Sergeant Hedgehog, black-eyed field mice, and an occasional rat, disposed of the food, but that did not matter so long as Lynette found that it had gone. Canterton himself would come down early, and empty the tea away to keep up the illusion.
“I think I’ll be a fairy some night, Lynette.”