He scorned the fare soon spread on the clothed sod, burning his throat stoically with a cup of unsweetened coffee. Eliza sat beyond the charring remains of the fire sinking from cherry-red embers to impalpable white ash. He observed with secret satisfaction that she too ate little: an appetite on her part, he felt, would have been a calamity.
'The meadows and distant woods were vague against the primrose west, the cyanite curtain of the east, when the baskets were assembled for the return. Anthony delayed over the arrangement of his craft until Eliza and himself were last in the floating procession. Dense shadows, drooping from the trees, filled the banks; overhead the sky was clear green. They swept silently forward with the current, a rare dip of the paddle. Eliza's countenance was just palely visible. The lilacs lay in a pallid heap at their feet. On either hand the world floated back darkly like an immaterial void through which an ebon stream bore them beyond the stars.
At a bend he reached up and caught hold of an overhanging branch, and they swung into a shallow backwater. A deep shelf of stone lay under the face of the bank, closed in by a network of wildgrape stems. “This is where I sometimes stay at night,” he told her; “no one knows but you.”
XVI
SHE rose, and, without warning, stepped out upon the rock. “Here's where you build your fire,” she cried at the discovery of a blackened heap of ashes. He secured the canoe and followed her. “Ideal,” she breathed. The sound of the fall below was faintly audible; the quavering cry of an owl, the beating of heavy wings, rose above the bank. “Don't you envy the old pastoral people following their flocks from land to land, setting up their tents by streams like this, waking with the dawn on the world? or gipsies... you must read 'Lavengro.'”
“I don't envy any one on God's little globe,” he asserted; “to be here with you is the best thing possible.”
“Something more desirable would soon occur to you.”
“Than you!” he protested; “than you!”