midday
They could do no more , so they fed the children lovingly and carried them home . The Thin Woman had baked three cakes . One of these she gave to each of the children and one she kept herself , whereupon they set out upon their journey to Angus Og . It was well after midday when they started . The fresh gaiety of the morning was gone , and a tyrannous sun , whose majesty was almost insupportable , forded it over the world . There was but little shade for the travellers , and , after a time , they became hot and weary and thirsty -- that is , the children did , but the Thin Woman , by reason of her thinness , was proof against every elemental rigour , except hunger , from which no creature is free . She strode in the centre of the road , a very volcano of silence , thinking twenty different thoughts at the one moment , so that the urgency of her desire for utterance kept her terribly quiet ; but against this crust of quietude there was accumulating a mass of speech which must at the last explode or petrify .