Without further questioning concerning antecedents and character, she led the way within. They passed through a wide hall, and down a gallery painted of a pleasant pale green, into a neat kitchen with windows that opened outward, and which had a brick-built fireplace and a wide Dutch chimney at the end. Brass preserving pans, shining skillets, and tin colanders made a brave show, set in a sort of diminishing perspective upon the walls. "Now if ye want breakfast ye must e'en put to your hand and help me to set the fire agoing, Gray Badger!" she cried, suddenly, looking at Scarlett. "Go get water to the spring. It is but a hundred yards beyond that oak in the hollow. And you, young Master High Treason, catch hold of that knife and set your white, high-treasonable hands to slicing the bacon." CHAPTER XXV TRUE LOVE AND PIGNUTS Mehitabel Smith calmly went to the inner door, and reaching down a linen smock, she slipped it on over her head and fastened it in with a belt at the waist. Wat and Scarlett moved meekly and obediently to their several duties, and the business of breakfast-making went gayly forward. When Wat returned from the side-table with the bacon sliced, Mehitabel Smith had the frying-pan ready and a fire of brushwood crackling merrily beneath it. "Do you not think," she said, without looking at him, being busy buttering the bottom of the pan, "that fish and bacon go well together when one is hungry? For me, I am always hungry on Branksea. Were you ever hungry in prison?" Wat muttered something ungracious enough, which might have been taken as a reply to either question, but the girl went on without heeding his answer. She sprinkled oatmeal over half a dozen fresh fish, and presently she had them making a pleasant, birsling sound in the pan, shielding her eyes occasionally with her hand when they spattered. "You must have been very happy in prison?" she said. And for the first time she looked directly at him for an answer. Wat was astonished. "Happy!" he said, "why, one does not expect to be very happy in a Dutch prison, or for that matter in any other. Prisons are not set up to add to folks' happiness that ever I heard." "But what experiences!" she cried; "what famous 'scapes and chances of adventure! To be in prison at your age (you are little more than a lad), and that for high-treason! Here on Branksea one has no such advantages. Only ships and seamen, pots of green paint, and hauling up and down the flag, or, at best, ninnies that think they ought to make love to you, because, forsooth, you are a girl. Ah, I would rather be in prison a thousand years!" Wat watched her without speaking as she moved nimbly and with a certain deft, defiant ease about the sprucely painted kitchen. "Do you believe in love? I don't!" she said, unexpectedly, turning the fish out on a platter and lifting the pan from the fire to prepare it for the bacon which Wat had been holding all the time in readiness for his companion.