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
statement that confronted me as I lifted the pot with the skirt of my
blouse and poured the greens into two brown crockery bowls that Adam kept
secreted with the pot on a ledge of the old spring-house.

"Well, a husky young farmer is the only kind of a man who need apply. I
mean a born rustic. I couldn't risk an amateur with the farm after all
you've taught me," I answered as we seated ourselves on the warm earth side
by side and began to dip the hunks of black bread into our bowls and lift
the delicious wilted leaves to our mouths with it, a mode of consumption it
had taken Pan several attempts to teach me. Pan never talks when he eats,
and he seems to browse food in a way that each time tempts me more and more
to reach out my hand and lift one of the red crests to see about the points
of his ears.

"Do you want to hear my invocation to my ultimate woman?" he asked as he
set his bowl down after polishing it out with his last chunk of bread some
minutes after I had so finished up mine.

"Is it more imperative than the one you give me under my window before I
have had less than a good half-night's sleep every morning?" I asked as I
crushed a blade of meadow fern in my hands and inhaled its queer tang.

"I await my beloved in
Grain fields.
Come, woman!
In thy eyes is truth.
Thy body must give food with
Sweat of labor, and thy lips
Hold drink for love thirst.
I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Come!"

Pan took my hand in his as he chanted, and held my fingers to his lips, and
ended his chant with several weird, eery, crooning notes blown across his
lips and through my fingers out into the moonlit shadows.

"I feel about you just as I do about one of Mrs. Ewe's lambkins," I
whispered, with a queer answering laugh in my voice, which held and
repeated the croon in his.

"I am thy child.
I am thy mate.
Oh, come!"

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