ithin the circle of
his arms, she put up her hands and cupped his face. Then, with a
gesture like a sigh, she let them fall to his waist, fastened them
about him and let her head lie on his bosom. She shut her eyes, seemed
contented and appeased. He clasped her, with a fine, protecting air
upon him, looking down tenderly at her resting head. So they stood
together in the dusk, while the wind tore at their thin covering, and
the snow, lying, made a broad patch of white upon his shoulder.

Breathless I looked at them, and my dog forgot to be cold. High on his
haunches, with lifted forepaw and sharp-cocked ears, he watched,
trembled and whined.

After a while, impatient as it appeared of the ravaging storm, the
male drew the female to the ground. They used no language, as we
understand it, and made no sign that I could see, but rather sank
together to get the shelter of the drift. He lay upon the snow, upon
the weather side, she close beside him. They crouched like two birds
in a storm, and hid their heads under their interlacing arms. He gave
the weather his back, and raised himself on his elbow, the better to
shield her. Within his arm she lay and cuddled to him snugly. I can
describe his action no more closely than by saying that he covered her
as a hen her chick. As a partridge grouts with her wings in a dusty
furrow, so he worked in the powdered snow to make her a nest. When the
night fell upon them, with its promise of bitter frost in the
unrelenting wind, she lay screened against its rigours by the shelter
of him. They were very still. Their heads were together, their cheeks
touched. I believe that they slept.

III

In the autumn, in harvest-time, I saw her with a little one. She was
lying now, deeply at ease, in the copse wood of the valley-head,
within a nest of brake-fern, and her colouring was richer, more in
tune with the glory of the hour. She had a burnt glow in her cheeks;
her hair showed the hue of the corn which, not a mile away, our people
were reaping afield. From where we were, she and I, one could hear the
rattle of the machine as it swept down the tall and serried wheat. It
was the top of noon when I found her; the sun high in heaven, but so
fierce in his power that you saw him through a mist of his own making,
and the sky all about him white as a sea-fog. The Oread's body was
sanguine brown, only her breast, which I saw half-revealed through a
slit in her smock, was snowy white. It was the bre