the promise.

Then Margaret led him to two small lodges on the skirts of the forest;
they were made of round logs, with moss and lichen still upon them, and
they were overgrown with the loveliest growths of summer--with
blackberry blossoms, a wonderful ghostly white, spread over the bushes
like fairies' linen out to dry, and wild roses more than were in any
other lovers' forest on earth, and the maddest sweetest confusion of
honeysuckle you ever saw. Within, the rooms were strewn with green
rushes, and hung with green cloths on which Margaret had embroidered
all the flowers and berries in their seasons, from the first small
violets blue and white to the last spindle-berries with their orange
hearts splitting their rosy rinds. And there was nothing else under
each roof but a round beech-stump for a stool, and a coffer of carved
oak with metal locks, and a low mattress stuffed with lamb's-fleece
picked from the thorns, and pillows filled with thistledown; and each
couch had a green covering worked with waterlily leaves and white and
golden lilies. "These are the Pilleygreen Lodges," said she, "and one
is mine and one is yours; and when we want cover we will find it here,
but when we do not we will eat and sleep in the open."

And so the whole of that July Hobb dwelt in the Pilleygreen Lodges in
Open Winkins with his love Margaret. And by the month's end they had
not done their talking. For did not a young lifetime lie behind them,
and did they not foresee a longer life ahead, and between lovers must
not all be told and dreamed upon? and beyond these lives in time, which
were theirs in any case, had not love opened to them a timeless life of
which inexhaustible dreams were to be exchanged, not always by words,
though indeed by their mouths, and by the speech of their hands and
arms and eyes? Hobb told her all there was to tell of the Burgh and his
life with his brothers, both before and after their tragedies, but he
did not often speak of them for it was a tale she hated to hear, and
sometimes she wept so bitterly that he had ado to comfort her, and
sometimes was so angry that he could hardly conciliate her. But such
was his own gentleness that her caprices could withstand it no more
than the shifting clouds the sun. And Margaret told him of herself, but
her tale was short and simple--that her parents had died in the forest
when she was young, and that she had lived there all her life working
with her needle, twice yearly