"My dear," she wailed, "aside from the vulgarity of the thing--you know that no one ever admits to a real interest in food--I am so hungry that if there is any more mention of eating I shall go off in a corner and howl. You know how those adorable German Christmas stories always begin: '_Es war Weinachtsabend. Tiefer Schnee lag am Boden.

Durch das Wald kam ein armes Madchen das weinte bitterlich._' The reason why she weinted bitterlich was because her soul was hurt at being kept out of the secret of the beautiful, beautiful food that was hidden in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus.

Let's discuss Nijinsky and the musical a.s.ses till you are ready----"

"All ready now!" he proclaimed, kneeling by the pyramid of leaves, twigs, and sticks he had been erecting. He lit a match and kindled a leaf. Fire ran through the ma.s.s and rosy light brightened the darkened snow. "By the way," he said, as with cold fingers he pulled at the straps of his pack, "I'm beginning to be afraid that we'll be a lot later getting home than we expected."

"Well, I suppose I'll go to sleep on the train, and wake up at every station and wail and make you uncomfortable, and Mason will be grieved and disapproving when I get home late, but just now I don't care. I don't! It's _la belle aventure_! Carl, do you realize that never in my twenty-four (almost twenty-five now!) never in all these years have I been out like this in the wilds, in the dark, not even with Phil? And yet I don't feel afraid--just terribly happy."

"You do trust me, don't you?"

"You know I do.... Yet when I realize that I really don't know you at all----!"

He had brought out, from the pack, granite-ware plates and cups, a stew-pan and a coffee-pot, a ruddied paper of meat and a can of peas, rolls, Johnny-cake, maple syrup, a screw-top bottle of cream, pasteboard boxes of salt and pepper and sugar. Lamb chops, coiled in the covered stew-pan, loudly broiled in their own fat, and to them the peas, heated in their can, were added when the coffee began to foam.

He dragged a large log to the side of the fire, and Ruth, there sitting, gorged shamelessly. Carl himself did not eat reticently.

Light snow was falling now, driven by them on the rising wind. The fire, where hot coals had piled higher and higher, was a refuge in the midst of the darkness. Carl rolled up another log, for protection from the weather, and placed it at right angles to the first.

"You were saying, at Mrs. Needham's, that we ought to have an old farm-house," he remarked, while she snuggled before the fire, her back against a log, her round knees up under her chin, her arms clasping her legs. "Let's build one right here."

Instantly she was living it. In the angle between the logs she laid out an outline of twigs, exclaiming: "Here is my room, with low ceiling and exposed rafters and a big open fireplace. Not a single touch of pale pink or rosebuds!"

"Then here's my room, with a work-bench and a bed nine feet long that I can lose myself in."

"Then here outside my room," said Ruth, "I'm going to have a brick terrace, and all around it heliotrope growing in pots on the brick wall."

"I'm sorry, blessed, but you can't have a terrace. Don't you realize that every brick would have to be carted two hundred miles through this wilderness?"

"I don't care. If you appreciated me you'd carry them on your back, if necessary."

"Well, I'll think it over, but----Oh, look here, I'm going to have a porch made out of fresh saplings, outside of my room, and it 'll overlook the hills, and it 'll have outdoor cots with olive-gray army blankets over them, and when you wake up in the morning you'll see the hills in the first sunlight."

"Glorious! I'll give up my terrace. Though I do think I was w'eedled into it."

"Seriously, Ruth, wouldn't you like to have such a place, back in the wilderness?"

"Love it! I'd be perfectly happy there. At least for a while. I wouldn't care if I never saw another aigrette or a fat Rhine maiden singing in thirty sharps."

"Listen, how would this be for a site? (Let me stick some more wood there on your side of the fire.) Once when I was up in the high Sierras, in California, I found a wooded bluff--you looked a thousand feet straight down to a clear lake, green as mint-sauce pretty nearly, not a wrinkle on it. There wasn't a sound anywhere except when the leaves rustled. Then on the other side you looked way up to a peak covered with snow, and a big eagle sailing overhead--sailing and sailing, hour after hour. And you could smell the pine needles and sit there and look way off----Would you like it?"

"Oh, I can't tell you how much!"

"Have to go there some day."

"When you're president of the VanZile Company you must give me a Touricar to go in, and perhaps I shall let you go, too."

"Right! I'll be chauffeur and cook and everything." Quietly exultant at her sweet, unworded promise of liking, he hastily said, to cover that thrill, "Even a poor old low-brow mechanic like me does get a kind of poetic fervor out of a view like that."

"But you aren't a low-brow mechanic. You make me so dreadfully weary when you're mock-humble. As a matter of fact, you're a famous man and I'm a poor little street waif. For instance, the way you talk about socialism when you get interested and let yourself go. Really excited.

I'd always thought that aviators and other sorts of heroes were such stolid dubs."

"Gee! it'd be natural enough if I did like to talk. Imagine the training in being with the English superintendent at the mine, that I was telling you about, and hearing Frazer lecture, and knowing Tony Bean with his South-American interests, and most of all, of course, knowing Forrest Haviland. If I had any pep in me----Course I'm terribly slangy, I suppose, but I couldn't help wading right in and wanting to talk to everybody about everything."

"Yes. Yes. Of course I'm abominably slangy, too. I wonder if every one isn't, except in books.... We've left our house a little unfinished, Carl."

"I'm afraid we'll have to, blessed. We'll have to be going. It's past seven, now; and we must be sure to catch the 8.09 and get back to town about nine."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am we must leave our house in the wilds."

"You really have enjoyed it?" He was cleaning the last of the dishes with snow, and packing them away. "Do you know," he said, cautiously, "I always used to feel that a girl--you say you aren't in society, but I mean a girl like you--I used to think it was impossible to play with such a girl unless a man was rich, which I excessively am not, with my little money tied up in the Touricar. Yet here we have an all-day party, and it costs less than three really good seats at the theater."

"I know. Phil is always saying that he is too poor to have a good time, and yet his grandmother left him fifteen thousand dollars capital in his own right, besides his allowance from his father and his salary from the law firm; and he infuriates me sometimes--aside from the tactlessness of the thing--by quite plainly suggesting that I'm so empty-headed that I won't enjoy going out with him unless he spends a lot of money and makes waiters and ushers obsequious. There are lots of my friends who think that way, both the girls and the men.

They never seem to realize that if they were just human beings, as you and I have been to-day, and not hide-bound members of the dance-and-tea league, they could beat that beastly artificial old city.... Phil once told me that _no_ man--mind you, no one at all--could possibly marry on less than fifteen thousand dollars a year. Simply proved it beyond a question."

"That lets me out."

"Phil said that no one could possibly live on the West Side--of course the fact that he and I are both living on the West Side doesn't count--and the cheapest good apartments near Fifth Avenue cost four thousand dollars a year. And then one can't possibly get along with less than two cars and four maids and a chauffeur. Can't be done!"

"He's right. Fawncy! Only three maids. Might as well be dead."

The pack was ready, now; he was swinging it to his back and preparing to stamp out the fire. But he dropped his burden and faced her in the low firelight. "Ruth, you won't make up your mind to marry Phil till you're _sure_, will you? You'll play with me awhile, won't you? Can't we explore a few more----"

She laughed nervously, trying to look at him. "As I said, Phil won't condescend to consider poor me till he has his fifteen thousand dollars a year, and that won't be for some time, I think, considering he is too well-bred to work hard."

"But seriously, you will----Oh, I don't know how to put it. You will let me be your playmate, even as much as Phil is, while we're still----"

"Carl, I've never played as much with any one as with you. You make most of the men I know seem very unenterprising. It frightens me.

Perhaps I oughtn't to let you jump the fence so easily."

"You _won't_ let Phil lock you up for a while?"

"No.... Mustn't we be going?"

"Thank you for letting the outlaw come to your party. The fire's out.

Come."

With the quenching of the fire they were left in smothering darkness.

"Where do we go?" she worried. "I feel completely lost. I can't make out a thing. I feel so lost and so blind, after looking at the fire."

Her voice betrayed that he was suddenly a stranger to her.

With hasty a.s.surance he said: "Sit tight! See. We head for that tall oak, up the slope, then through the clearing, keeping to the right.

You'll be able to see the oak as soon as you get the firelight out of your eyes. Remember I used to hunt every fall, as a kid, and come back through the dark. Don't worry."

"I can just make out the tree now."

"Right. Now for it."

"Let me carry my skees."

"No, you just watch your feet." His voice was pleasant, quiet, not too intimate. "Don't try to guide yourself by your eyes. Let your feet find the safe ground. Your eyes will fool you in the dark."