3
“Read me some poetry, Felix,” said Rose-Ann, after dinner, as they lay drowsily, in a great warm nest of cushions, in front of the fire in the room upstairs.
He stirred himself, and then relaxed. Rose-Ann’s head was nestled in the hollow under his shoulder, and her red-gold hair, unbound, flowed across her bosom and touched his caressing hand. He was altogether too happily situated at this moment to want to go downstairs and look for a book of poems. Besides, why need he?
“And frosts are slain and flowers begotten.”
he began. She closed her eyes, and from her quiet breathing one might have thought her asleep. But once when he faltered, forgetting the words, Rose-Ann murmured them softly:
“And frosts are slain and flowers begotten.”
He took it up, in his voice of subdued chanting:
“And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins....”
and so to the end.