"I can't take you into the boudoir," she said, thinking of the litter of parcels. For a moment a picture rose before her of the child all expectation and excitement about his Christmas presents, but it quickly faded, giving place to the more vital interest of the moment.
He stretched his hands out towards the door in fear and abhorrence.
"You'll never get me in there again alive," he cried. "Your cursed scent gets into my brain and drives me half mad. And to-day it would be ten times worse. But I tell you what;" his eye sought the window where the afternoon sun had made small clearings in the frost pattern on the panes. "Out there in the snow it is clear and bracing; and so quiet and lonely that one could talk in peace. Shout defiance at the world, too, if one has the mind. Put on a wrap and come."
She acquiesced joyously, and quickly wound a lace scarf round her head, threw over her diaphanous house dress a heavy fur-cloak, and hurried before him out at the door unseen by any one in the house. She could not refrain from congratulating herself on this point aloud, and he did so silently. Their flushed faces met the tingling cold of the winter evening. The sun was going down. A brilliant crescent moon hung in the steel blue eastern sky, above the stables, the copulas of which cut sharply into the air.
The drone of the threshing-machine was heard coming from the barn, otherwise the yard was still and deserted. They took the path skirting the gable wing of the castle, opened the postern gate, the latch of which was frozen, and entered the garden. It lay shimmering before them in its garment of snow with an opal haze hanging over it. The urns at the corners of the terrace were capped with white and the vines on the wall cowered under their straw covers like freezing children.
As they crossed the lawn Felicitas tried to take Leo's arm, but her heavy furs impeded her movements, and she fell behind. The path became lost in the snow on the outskirts of the plantation, but still they were not disposed to turn back.
They walked on silently in single file, she trying to step in his footprints. Once he glanced round and asked where they were going.
"I don't know," she said, "only let us go on."
Aimlessly they wandered round the plantation. They both had a feeling as if they would like to creep away beyond the ken of human eyes.
Then he heard her teeth chattering. "You are cold," he said; "we will go back."