‘Do you hate it?’ she asked, puzzled, wondering.

‘If I couldn’t come near to you, if you weren’t here, I should hate it. I couldn’t bear it,’ he answered.

‘But the people are nice,’ she said.

‘I mean the stillness, the cold, the frozen eternality,’ he said.

She wondered. Then her spirit came home to him, nestling unconscious in him.

‘Yes, it is good we are warm and together,’ she said.

And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel glowing out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a cluster of yellow berries. It seemed like a bunch of