"You foolish!" she said scornfully; but her eyes were kind.
After supper, the mosquitoes being in abeyance, they lay for awhile in a row beside the fire, before turning in under their respective mosquito bars. By this time all constraint was melted. Ralph was accepted as one of them. It appeared that Charley knew more English than he had been prepared to confess to a stranger, so that he was not altogether shut out from their talk.
Ralph lay in the middle, his shoulder warm against Nahnya's while the happy blood flew through his veins. Meanwhile the old question asked itself, without any answer being forthcoming: was she feeling the same ecstasy as he, or was she unconscious of the delicious contact? Surely she must be aware of the current that leaped from her body into his. His hand groped slyly on the ground between them for hers, but without reward.
Nevertheless Nahnya really unbent, and proved for once that she could talk and laugh as easily as any girl. Ralph often looked back on that hour. The boy and girl gave him his first lesson in Cree; tepiskow—to-night; mooniyas—white man; pahkwishegan—bread; and so on, laughing endlessly at his efforts to pronounce the words. In return Ralph offered to extend Charley's knowledge of the English tongue, and set forth as his first exercise the ancient limerick:
A tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to teach two young tooters to toot.
Said the two to the tutor
Is it easier to toot or
To tutor two tooters to toot?
The woods rang with their laughter. Never had brother and sister heard such mirth-provoking sounds on the human tongue. Charley was obliged to roll on the ground and howl to relieve his breast of its weight of fun. Nahnya's low, liquid laughter was like celestial music in Ralph's ears. The desire was well-nigh insupportable in his breast to start Charley rolling down the bank with a thrust of the foot, and turning over to seize her in his arms and stop her laughing mouth with kisses.
IV
THE DAY OF DAYS
They issued from under their mosquito bars to behold a scene as delicately bright as sunrise in fairyland. The sun shone through the green-hung corridor of the stream full in their faces, and the silkily eddying water caught at its level rays as if strings of diamonds were stretched across from bank to bank and gently agitated. To the dark trunks of the pine forest on either hand the fairies had pinned fantastic banners of fairy gold leaf. Nahnya and Ralph looked at it, and looking at each other, shared their pleasure without the necessity of speaking. To Ralph the sight of Nahnya was like the very Spirit of Morning making him over anew.
As they sat after breakfast charmed by the beauty of it, a full-grown moose rounded the bend upstream and came splashing unconcernedly toward their camp, his noble, ugly head and his racer limbs outlined against the golden mist. He carried his heavy head with a lowering pride, and stepped like a monarch. His antlers, that amazing extravagance of nature, were just now half-grown, and gloved in bloomy velvet.