n in the hero's pack. Now let's have no more imaginary menus.
Let's discuss Nijinsky and the musical asses 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 mass 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