“Not in the least. But are you expecting a wayside refuge of that description to be miraculously endowed with a well-furnished larder?”
“No. But I think my knapsack can make good the deficiency.” he replied composedly.
Jean looked at him with dancing eyes. Having once yielded to the day’s unconventional adventure, she had surrendered herself whole-heartedly to the enjoyment of it.
She made one reservation, however. Some instinct of self-protection prevented her from enlightening her companion as to her partly English nationality. There was no real necessity for it, seeing that he spoke French with the utmost fluency, and his assumption that she was a Frenchwoman seemed in some way to limit the feeling of intimacy, conferring on her, as it were, a little of the freedom of an incognito.
“A la bonne heure!” she exclaimed gaily. “So you invite me to share your lunch, monsieur le professeur?”
“I’ve invited you to share my day, haven’t I?” he replied, smiling.
They steered for the bank, and when he had helped off her skates and removed his own, slinging them over his arm, they started off along the steep white track which wound its way upwards through the pine-woods.
As they left the bright sunlight that still glittered on the snowy slopes behind them, it seemed as though they plunged suddenly into another world—a still, mysterious, twilit place, where the snow underfoot muffled the sound of their steps and the long shadows of the pines barred their path with sinister, distorted shapes.
Jean, always sensitive to her surroundings, shivered a little.
“It’s rather eerie, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s just as if someone had suddenly turned the lights out.”