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<h3> XLVII </h3> "You forgot me last night." "Yes, I did." Clavering smiled unrepentantly. "You looked horribly primitive." "No more so than I felt." They were in a boat on the lake. The air was crisp and cold although the sun blazed overhead. Clavering was happy in a disreputable old sweater that he kept at the camp, and baggy corduroy trousers tucked into leggins, but Mary wore an angora sweater and skirt of a vivid grass green and a soft sport hat of the same shade, the rim turned down over eyes that might never have looked upon life beyond these woods and mountains. Clavering was hatless and smoked his pipe lazily as he pulled with long slow strokes. Other boats were on the lake, the women in bright sweaters and hats that looked like floating autumn leaves, and the lake was liquid amber. A breeze blew warm scents out of the woods. The water lilies had opened to the sun and looked oddly artificial in their waxen beauty, at the feet of those ancient trees. Stealthy footsteps behind that wall of trees, or a sudden loud rustling, told of startled deer. The distant peak looked to be enamelled blue and white, and the long slopes of the nearer mountains were dark green under a blue mist, the higher spruce rising like Gothic spires. Clavering smiled into her dancing eyes. "You look about fourteen," he said tenderly. "I don't feel much more. I spent a month or two every year in these woods—let us play a game. Make believe that I am Mary Ogden and you have met me here for the first time and are deliberately setting out to woo me. Begin all over again. It—you, perhaps!—was what I always dreamed of up here. I used to row on the lake for hours by myself, or sit alone in the very depths of the woods. Do you think that famous imagination of yours could accomplish a purely personal feat? I haven't nearly as much but I'm quite sure I could. And then—after—we could just go on from here." He looked at her in smiling sympathy. "Done. We met last night, Miss Ogden, and I went down at the first shot. I'm now out to win you or perish in the attempt. But before we get down to business I'll just inform you of a resolution I took a day or two ago. I shall get a license the day we return and marry you the morning you sail." "Oh!" And then she realized in a blinding flash what she had fought out of her consciousness: that she had shrunk from the consummation of marriage, visualized a long period of intermittent but superficial love-making and delightful companionship, an exciting but incomplete idyl of mind and soul and senses.… Underneath always an undertone of repulsion and incurable ennui … the dark residuum of immedicable disillusion … that what she had really wanted was love with its final expression eliminated. But she realized it only as a fact, … a psychological study of another … buried down there in an artificial civilization she had forgotten … in that past that belonged to Marie Zattiany … with which Mary Ogden had nothing to do … her mind at last was as young as her body, and this man had accomplished the miracle. The present and the future were his. She looked up into his eyes, anxious but imperious, and answered softly: "Why not?" "Exactly. I've no desire to take that long journey with you, but I'm not going to take any chances, either.… Ah! Here's an idea that beats the other hollow. When the party breaks up we'll go down to Huntersville with them, marry there, and return to the camp. I don't see how your Dolomites could beat this for a honeymoon. Why in thunder should we trail all the way over to Europe to find seclusion when we must return in two or three months, anyhow? It's a scandalous waste. We can go to the Dolomites for our second honeymoon—we'll have one every year. And this is much more in the picture if you want to be Mary Ogden again. She never would have proposed anything so elaborate and unnecessary. Say yes, and don't be more than a minute about it." Mary drew in her breath sharply. The plan made a violent and irresistible appeal. There would be no long interval for possible reversal, for contacts in which it might be difficult to hold fast to her new faith. But what excuse could she make to leave him later?… Later? Did Austria really exist? Did she care? Let the future take care of itself. Her horizon, a luminous band, encircled these mountains.… She smiled into his ardent eyes. "Very well. I'll write to Hortense today and tell her to send me up a trousseau of sorts. And now—you are to understand that you have not dared to propose to me yet and are suffering all the qualms of uncertainty, for I am a desperate flirt, and took a long walk in the woods this morning with Mr. Scores." "Very well, Miss Ogden, I will now do my best to make a fool of myself, and as soon as we return to camp will telegraph to New York for a five-pound box of chocolates." "Hark! Hark! The Lark!" shouted Todd as he rowed past with Babette Gold. "Only there isn't a lark or any other bird in these woods that I've been able to discover." "Birds sing one at a time," shouted back Clavering. "Choir of jealous soloists." He rowed into a little cove and they gazed into the dim green woods, but the maple leaves grew almost to the ground, and it was like peering through the tiny changing spaces of a moving curtain through which one glimpsed green columns flecked with gold. He beached the boat, and they walked, single file, up a narrow run-way made by the deer. Everywhere was that leafy whispering curtain. Between the rigid spruce and soft maples were fragrant balsams, and ferns, and an occasional pine with its pale green spikes. They passed enormous boulders detached from the glaciers that had ground mountains in their embrace, but today things of mere beauty in their coats of pink and green and golden moss. Their footsteps made no sound on the mossy path, and they came suddenly upon a deer and his doe drinking at a pool. But the antlered head was flung back instantly, the magnificent buck wheeled on his hind legs, gave a leap and went crashing through the forest snorting his protesting fury. The doe scampered after, her white-lined tail standing up perfectly straight. They sat down on a log, dried and warmed by the sun in this open space, and talked for two hours. There was no need for careful avoidance of dangerous subjects. Clavering had come to these woods nearly every year since he had made the north his home, and she had forgotten nothing of her woodland lore. When one is "in the woods," as the great Adirondacks are familiarly called, one rarely talks of anything but their manifold offerings. It is easy enough to forget the world. They both had had their long tramps, their rough campings-out, more or less exciting adventures. When a loud bell, hung in a frame outside the camp, summoned them to dinner, they walked out briskly. Once, as the trail widened, he touched her fingers tentatively. She let her own curl for a moment, then gave him a provocative glance over her shoulder and hurried on. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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