dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that
was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end,
as I went upon my round of duties, I put the ache of the memories of it
from me, but in the night I took the agony into my heart and cherished it.

"And it's the Romney hand ye have with the herb-pot, Woman dear," said Adam
as he squatted down beside our simmering pot and stirred it with the clean
hickory stick I had barked for that purpose when, very shortly after high
noon, I had put the greens, with the two wild onion sprigs and the handful
of inevitable black-walnut kernels, into the iron pot set on the two rocks
with their smoldering green fire between. "You know you'd rather be eating
this dinner of sprouts and black bread with your poor Adam than--than
dancing that 'Cloud Drift' in town with Matthew Berry--or Baldwin the
enemy."

"Yes," I answered, as I knelt beside him and thrust in another slim stick
and tasted the juice of the pot off the end. "But it would be hard to make
Matthew believe it. I forgot to tell you that Matt is really going in for
farming, thanks to the evil influence of your friend Evan Baldwin, who
wouldn't know a farm if he met one on the road, a real farm, I mean. Poor
Matt little knows the life of toil he is plotting for himself."

"Is he coming to live at Elmnest?" asked Adam, in a voice of entire
unconcern, as he took the black loaf from his gypsy pack and began to cut
it up into hunks and lay it on the clean rock beside the pot.

"He is not," I answered with an indignation that I could see no reason
for.

"Sooner or later, Woman, you'll have to take a mate," was the primitive