Then he was beside her under the robes, giving to her chilled body the warmth of his own. Gratefully she snuggled very close, while the horses stamped inside and the wind screamed outside. Ellis put both arms around her. Sleep claimed Barbara.
When she awakened, it was still black night inside the cabin and the wind still screamed outside. Barbara felt warm, snug, comfortable. She put out an exploring hand to touch Ellis, and he responded instantly, taking her whole hand and wrist into his warm, sensitive fingers.
"Are you awake, Barbara?"
"Ellis," she whispered. "You saved our lives."
He pressed her hand gently and held it undemandingly in his own. "I've been lying here thinking," he said. "When we were out in the storm, I wasn't sure we could reach this cabin. Suppose we hadn't come through? I was lying here trying to figure out what was the thing I would most regret. Know what I decided?"
"What?" Sleepily content, she awaited his answer. How strange—or perhaps it wasn't so strange—that in this barren cabin, in utter darkness and isolation, when they had narrowly escaped death, that Ellis should be able to talk to her so openly, so easily, more easily than at any time since she had met him. "What would you most regret, Ellis?"
"I would regret that I had not known you longer, had more time with you. I would regret that I hadn't told you more about myself, even the bad things. I want to tell you everything about myself, Barbara. Whether you say yes or no to me later on, I want it to be on the basis of all the truth. May I tell you about—about before I came to Snedeker's?"
"Please," she whispered.
He told her, then, about his gentle laughing mother, and his loving but unreliable father who had made too much money gambling and had lived too fast and died too young. And he told her about his Uncle George who had not only stolen most of the family property but had tried to rule Ellis with an iron rod, had disrupted all his plans and made a fool of him before his friends, and who had ended up by receiving a punch in the jaw from his outraged nephew. He told her of his one good year at college, of his falling in love with Mary Harkness and his following her across the country. He told her of his moodiness (which she already knew) and of his quick temper (which she already knew) and he told her that he was ashamed of his temper and that he recognized that it was a remnant of his childhood, and that most of the time it was unjustified, and that he couldn't promise to get rid of it immediately but that he would keep on trying until he did. He spared himself nothing, and only by reading between the lines was she able to see a young man buffeted and lonely, but eager for friendship and love, with a wealth of devotion to offer, a true humility and a burning desire for truth and honesty above all things.
How different was this blurted, forthright account from the smooth, polished presentation of a Hugo Gearey!