“I’m not quite such an idiot,” David laughed, “even if I am crazy in love. Now the next problem is breakfast. I suppose a farmhouse will be the best bet. It wouldn’t be safe for us to hang around Canfield for three or four hours, waiting for the marriage license bureau to open. We’re going to be married, darling, before the law has a chance to lay its hands on us.” They trudged along the state highway, miraculously revived by hope that all their troubles would soon be over, their eyes searching eagerly for a farmhouse. And just over the rise of a low hill they found it—a tenant farmer’s unpainted shack, from whose chimney rose a straight column of blue smoke. They found the family at breakfast—the wife a slim, pretty, discontented-looking girl only a few years older than Sally; the husband, thick, short, dark and dour, at least a dozen years older than his wife; and a tow-headed baby boy of three. The kitchen was an unpainted and unpapered lean-to of rough, weather-darkened pine. But Sally and David had eyes only for the tall stack of buckwheat cakes, the platter of roughly cut, badly fried “side meat,” the huge graniteware coffee pot set on a chipped plate in the center of the table. “Breakfast?” the dour tenant-farmer grunted, in answer to David’s question. “Reckon so, if you can eat what we got. It’ll cost you 50 cents a piece. I don’t work from sun-up to sun-down to feed tramps.” “Oh, Jim!” the wife protested, flushing. “Cakes and coffee ain’t worth 50 cents. I might run down to the big house and get some eggs and cream—” she added uncertainly, her distressed brown eyes flickering from Sally and David in the doorway to her scowling husband. “We’ll be delighted with the buckwheat cakes and bacon and coffee, and not think a dollar too much for our breakfast,” David cut in, smiling placatingly upon the farmer. “We’re farmers ourselves, and we’re used to farm ways. How are crops around here, sir?” “My name’s Buckner,” the dour farmer answered grudgingly. “I’ll bring in a couple of chairs. Millie, you’d better fill up this here syrup pitcher and you might open a jar of them damson preserves.” “And I’ll beat up some more hot cake batter,” Millie Buckner fluttered happily. “It won’t take me a minute.” Sally and David washed their hands and faces at the pump outside the kitchen door, drying them on a fresh roller towel that Jim Buckner brought them. “Run away to get married, have you?” the farmer asked in an almost pleasant voice, as he led the way to the newly set table. “Yes,” David answered simply. “We walked all night and we’re rather tired, but we thought there was no use in going in to Canfield until pretty near nine o’clock.”