“Life is glorious!” she exclaimed resonantly. “To eat one’s own bag on the top of Drouva under the moon! Oh!”
She looked at the moon, then bent over her plate of metal-ware which was set on the tiny folding-table. In her joy she was exactly like a big child.
“I wonder how many I shall get to-morrow. I got my eye in at the very start. Really, Dion, you know, I’m a gifted creature. It isn’t every one——”
And she ran on, laughing at herself, reveling in her whimsical pretense of conceit till dinner was over.
“Now a cigarette! Never have I enjoyed any meal so much as this! It’s only out of doors that one gets hold of the real joie de vivre.”
“You’re never without it, thank God,” returned Dion, striking a match for her.
So still was the evening that the flame burned steadily even upon that height facing immensities. Rosamund leaned to it with the cigarette between her lips. Her face was browned to the sun. She looked rather like a splendid blonde gipsy, with loose yellow hair and the careless eyes of those who dwell under smiling heavens. She sent out a puff of cigarette smoke, directing it with ardor to the moon which now rode high above them.
“I’d like to catch up nature in my arms to-night,” she said. “Come, Dion, let’s go a little way.”
She was up, and put her arm through his like a comrade. He squeezed her arm against his side and, strolling there in the night on the edge of the hill, she talked at first with almost tumultuous energy, with an energy as of an Amazon who cared for the things of the soul as much as for the things of the body. To-night her body and soul seemed on the same high level of intensity.
At first she talked of the present, of their life in Greece and of what it had meant to her, what it had done for her; and then, always with her arm through Dion’s, she began to talk of the future.