Belinda saw him with a start. She had forgotten... she hated him, didn’t she? She remembered that she was still holding the frying-pan, and dropped it guiltily.
“It’s about breakfast-time,” she said. Her mouth felt clumsy. Odd, how hard it had become to make every word as impersonal and distant as she had trained herself to do — to convey with every sentence that she only spoke to him because she had to.
He threw off his blankets, and dived back into them again to return with two handfuls of twigs.
“Always sleep with some firewood and keep it dry,” he explained.
In a few seconds flames were licking up among the dead ashes, steaming the moisture from the other wood as he built it up around his tinder in a neat cone. He gathered the eggs together, and one of them escaped from his corral and went rolling down the hill. He ran after it, grabbed for it, and caught his toe on the projecting root of a tree; the chase ended in a headlong plunge and a complete somersault which brought him up with his back to the bole of a young sapling. There was something so comical about him as he sat there, with the rescued ovum triumphantly clutched in one hand, that Belinda felt a smile tugging at her lips. She fought against it; her chest ached, and the laughter tore at her throat; she gave way because she had to laugh or suffocate, and bowed before the gale. Simon was laughing too. The wall, the precious barrier that she had built up, was crumbling like sand in that tempest of mirth, and she could do nothing to hold it together...
Presently she was saying, “Why don’t you show me how you do those eggs, then I could take a turn with them?”
“It’s easy enough when you know how. Like everything else, there’s a trick in it. You’ve got to remember that a scrambled egg goes on cooking itself after you take it off the fire, so if you try to finish them in the pan they’re hard and crumby when you serve them. Take them off while they still look half raw, and they end up just fine and juicy.”
She had never enjoyed a meal more in her life, and when it was finished she could not bear to think that they must leave that place almost at once. It was like a reprieve when he announced that his shirt was unspeakable, and they must pause for a washing day. They scrubbed their clothes in pools formed by the tiny waterfall that cascaded close by their camping-ground, and spread them in the sun to dry. It was mid-afternoon before she had to tear herself away: she went down with him to the road feeling newly refreshed and fit for a hundred miles before sundown, yet with the knowledge that she left part of her heart behind up there with the trees and sky.
As they reached the road a band of twenty young people were coming towards them, singing as they came. The men wore leather shorts and white linen shirts; some of the girls wore the same, others wore brief leather skirts. All of them carried packs, and many of the packs were heavy. Belinda saw one man laden with an enormous iron pot and a collection of smoke-blackened pans: he looked like a huge metalized snail.
“ Grüss Gott! ” cried the leader, breaking the song as he came up with them, in the universal greeting of Tirolese wayfarers, and Simon smiled and answered, “ Grüss Gott! ” The others of the party joined in. A couple from the middle fell out and stopped.