A book they were reading together lay on the corner shelf, with the mark still in the place where they had read last.

After lighting the fire, she sat near it, watching the flames steal up from the small pile of fat pine chips underneath, sending up red tongues of fire, until the great logs were wrapped in the hot embrace of the flames, trembling, quivering, and leaping high in their mad joy, transmuting all they touched.

“It’s like love,” she murmured, and smiled. “Only it’s quicker. It does in one hour what love takes a lifetime to do. Those logs might have lain on the ground and rotted if they’d been left alone, but now the fire just holds them and caresses them like, and they grow warm and glow like the sun, and give all they can while they last, until they’re