“I ought to know something about fires; I’ve made enough of them. As a young fellow I did a lot of jobs that took me into remote places, surveying and construction gangs; and I’ve camped a bit—hunting and fishing. I might even say that I can make coffee and fry bacon without utterly destroying their food values.”
She established him before the fire in the most comfortable chair in the room and sat at his feet. With her arms folded upon his knees to make a resting place for her head she listened with the rapt attention a child gives to a beguiling chronicler as he told how he was lost for three days in the Canadian wilds, and of a flight by canoe on a stormy night to fetch a doctor for one of his party who had fallen ill. He had given her from the first a sense of far horizons, and tonight her fancy perfected every picture his narratives suggested of hills and woodlands and streams. They constituted a new background against which she saw in him an heroic figure equal to any demand that might be made upon his strength and courage.
“One of these days,” he went on, “We must do the Canadian Rockies together; and then I’d like to take you to some places I know in Maine—just guides and canoes and us; and I want to do India before I die, but not without you. You’re in all my future! I want to live a long time to enjoy life with you. Does that appall you?”
She was gazing wide-eyed into the fire, her dark eyes the harbor of dreams, and he laughed and bent forward to touch her cheek and break the spell that bound her.
“I should love it all, dear!” she said with a happy sigh. “To be with you, to share everything with you! Oh, that would be more happiness than I could bear!”
“You do love me; tell me, dear, once more, that you do!”
“More than all this earth and the stars! More than all the other universes beyond this one!” she cried, laughing at her extravagance.
He raised his hand and bade her listen.
“I thought the wind changed awhile ago. The weather spirit’s abroad. Let’s have a look.”
He threw on the porch lights and opened the front door. It was snowing hard; the porch steps and driveway were already covered, and the nearest trees had been transformed into ghostly sentinels. She clapped her hands in delight at the beauty of it.