“You were as pretty as a picture in that pink hat,” he said.
She laughed with pleasure. “Oh, I guess it was the hat!” she rejoined.
They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that it smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.
Suddenly she rose to her feet and said: “We mustn’t stay here any longer.”
He continued to gaze at her vaguely, only half-roused from his dream. “There’s plenty of time,” he answered.
They stood looking at each other as if the eyes of each were straining to absorb and hold fast the other’s image. There were things he had to say to her before they parted, but he could not say them in that place of summer memories, and he turned and followed her in silence to the sleigh. As they drove away the sun sank behind the hill and the pine-boles turned from red to grey.
By a devious track between the fields they wound back to the Starkfield road. Under the open sky the light was still clear, with a reflection of cold red on the eastern hills. The clumps of trees in the snow seemed to draw together in ruffled lumps, like birds with their heads under their wings; and the sky, as it paled, rose higher, leaving the earth more alone.
As they turned into the Starkfield road Ethan said: “Matt, what do you mean to do?”
She did not answer at once, but at length she said: “I’ll try to get a place in a store.”
“You know you can’t do it. The bad air and the standing all day nearly killed you before.”