“Must wear,” she said, and tied it around him.
The touch of her fingers was too much. He turned and took her in his arms, and found himself tightly bound in hers, and kissed the eager lips uplifted to his.
“Oh, Felix!” she cried in a weak, smothered voice. “Felix, lover!”
“And now,” she said at last, smiling happily and rousing herself from their dream, “we really must get breakfast!”
2
After breakfast, which was prolonged for hours by talk and cigarettes and endless cups of coffee, they “bundled up” and took a long walk, through the deep snow, stumbling and laughing like children, and as indefatigable as children. First they went down to the lake, that snowy waste strewn with high-piled ice-hummocks, and with the blue of water showing strangely here and there. Then they turned their backs on it, and walked toward the west, where the black branches of trees made delicate patterns against the sky. They were as if aware of the kinship of their love to the life of the earth, and seeking outdoors that magical sympathy of natural living things which no roof-tree, however hospitable, can furnish to lovers. This great white expanse, with no green thing visible anywhere, with not even the friendly touch of the ground underfoot, might have seemed to hold out no invitation to their love. It was an earth sunken in winter-sleep, apparently unconscious of their presence, vastly indifferent to their demand. And yet they loved it, and it gave them something which they craved.
Utterly exhausted, they reached home at last, with the sunset flaming behind the black branches. They were ravenously hungry. But they faced the prospect of clearing up after last night’s feast, a task blithely postponed that morning, before they would have dishes enough to eat from. Of course, they might have had Mrs. Cowan come in; but they preferred their magic isolation. Changed into dry garments, they set to work washing dishes—not without a friendly quarrel over which one should wash and which one wipe them.
“Maybe you think a man doesn’t know how to wash dishes,” Felix said belligerently.
“No,” said Rose-Ann, “but I think a woman might have the privilege of washing dishes in her own house.... Felix, I wish this were our own house! I shall hate to go back to town after this.... But don’t let’s think about that now. All right, selfish, you can wash the dishes!”
The thought frightened Felix a little. A house of their own! A house in the country! How beautiful, and yet how—but no, nothing seemed impossible now.... They could plan for it, and work for it, and at last have it, together....