"You will," she whispered swiftly. "Derry, darling, you will!"
Wallie sidled in and, with an adoring grin at Mary Josephine, suggested that he had more coffee and toast ready to serve, piping hot. Keith was relieved. The day had begun auspiciously, and over the bacon and eggs, done to a ravishing brown by the little Jap, he told Mary Josephine of some of his bills of fare in the north and how yesterday he had filled up on bacon smell at Andy Duggan's. Steak from the cheek of a walrus, he told her, was equal to porterhouse; seal meat wasn't bad, but one grew tired of it quickly unless he was an Eskimo; polar bear meat was filling but tough and strong. He liked whale meat, especially the tail-steaks of narwhal, and cold boiled blubber was good in the winter, only it was impossible to cook it because of lack of fuel, unless one was aboard ship or had an alcohol stove in his outfit. The tidbit of the Eskimo was birds' eggs, gathered by the ton in summer-time, rotten before cold weather came, and frozen solid as chunks of ice in winter. Through one starvation period of three weeks he had lived on them himself, crunching them raw in his mouth as one worries away with a piece of rock candy. The little lines gathered in Mary Josephine's forehead at this, but they smoothed away into laughter when he humorously described the joy of living on nothing at all but air. And he added to this by telling her how the gluttonous Eskimo at feast-time would lie out flat on their backs so that their womenfolk could feed them by dropping chunks of flesh into their open maws until their stomachs swelled up like the crops of birds overstuffed with grain.
It was a successful breakfast. When it was over, Keith felt that he had achieved a great deal. Before they rose from the table, he startled Mary Josephine by ordering Wallie to bring him a cold chisel and a hammer from Brady's tool-chest.
"I've lost the key that opens my chest, and I've got to break in," he explained to her.
Mary Josephine's little laugh was delicious. "After what you told me about frozen eggs, I thought perhaps you were going to eat some," she said.
She linked her arm in his as they walked into the big room, snuggling her head against his shoulder so that, leaning over, his lips were buried in one of the soft, shining coils of her hair. And she was making plans, enumerating them on the tips of her fingers. If he had business outside, she was going with him. Wherever he went she was going. There was no doubt in her mind about that. She called his attention to a trunk that had arrived while he slept, and assured him she would be ready for outdoors by the time he had opened his chest. She had a little blue suit she was going to wear. And her hair? Did it look good enough for his friends to see? She had put it up in a hurry.
"It is beautiful, glorious," he said.
Her face pinked under the ardency of his gaze. She put a finger to the tip of his nose, laughing at him. "Why, Derry, if you weren't my brother I'd think you were my lover! You said that as though you meant it TERRIBLY much. Do you?"
He felt a sudden dull stab of pain, "Yes, I mean it. It's glorious. And so are you, Mary Josephine, every bit of you."
On tiptoe she gave him the warm sweetness of her lips again. And then she ran away from him, joy and laughter in her face, and disappeared into her room. "You must hurry or I shall beat you," she called back to him.