“In a month’s time.”
“Forever and ever?”
“It feels like that now.”
“Yes. There doesn’t seem to have been anything but you and I. You’re a little slip of a woman to fill the whole world.” And he lifted her clean off her feet. She lay back in his arms and her eyes closed, and he could feel her whole body surrender to his strength, her whole spirit come out to meet his in love.
[IX
YOUNG LOVE DREAMING]
EVERY year they visited Scotland and brought new stores of happiness to the dell where they had first discovered it. Always, René declared, through their joy there ran the song of the burn, and the wind in the trees, the beauty that had first awakened him. They made high holiday. Cathleen liked to stroll about the woods or lie in them with a book (she could hardly get him to read at all). He loved to wander over the moors alone or to go striding over the hills, and to come back to her in the evening. When they spent their days apart they would meet in the dell, and, as of old time, he would make a couch of bracken for her. And he would lie by her side and rejoice in her beauty, fondle her, praise her, tease her.
“I don’t believe,” he would say, “we shall ever be old.”
“Not when you look at the children” (they had three) “and see how they grow?”
“Least of all then. I watch them and discover new worlds in them, and often through them I discover new wonders in you.”