"It is so beautiful--so beautiful!" she cried, with the rapture of a child, "and it all spells Freedom. I should like to be the freest thing that has life under heaven. What is the freest thing in the world?"
She turned her face on him with the question, and her eyes widened after a way they had until they seemed to be searching far out in the fields of untalked-of things, and seeing there something that clouded them with disquietude.
"I should like to be a man," she went on, "a man and a _hobo_." The furrow vanished and the eyes suddenly went dancing. "That is what I should like to be--a hobo with a tomato-can and a fire beside the railroad-track."
The man said nothing, and she looked up to encounter a steady gaze from eyes somewhat puzzled.
His pupils held a note of pained seriousness, and her voice became responsively vibrant as she leaned forward with answering gravity in her own.
"What is it?" she questioned. "You are troubled."
He looked away beyond her to the pine-topped hills, which seemed to be marching with lances and ragged pennants, against the orange field of the sky. Then his glance came again to her face.
"They call me the Shadow," he said slowly. "You know whose shadow that means. These weeks have made us comrades, and I am jealous because you are the sum of two girls, and I know only one of them. I am jealous of the other girl at home in Europe. I am jealous that I don't know why you, who are seemingly subject only to your own fancy, should crave the freedom of the hobo by the railroad track."
She bent forward to adjust a twisted martingale, and for a moment her face was averted. In her hidden eyes at that moment, there was deep suffering, but when she straightened up she was smiling.
"There is nothing that you shall not know. But not yet--not yet! After all, perhaps it's only that in another incarnation I was a vagrant bee and I'm homesick for its irresponsibility."
"At all events"--he spoke with an access of boyish enthusiasm--"I 'thank whatever gods may be' that I have known you as I have. I'm glad that we have not just been idly rich together. Why, Cara, do you remember the day we lost our way in the far woods, and I foraged corn, and you scrambled stolen eggs? We were forest folk that day; primitive as in the years when things were young and the best families kept house in caves."