Utterly exhausted, they reached home at last, with the sunset flaming behind the black branches. They were ravenously hungry. But they faced the prospect of clearing up after last night’s feast, a task blithely postponed that morning, before they would have dishes enough to eat from. Of course, they might have had Mrs. Cowan come in; but they preferred their magic isolation. Changed into dry garments, they set to work washing dishes—not without a friendly quarrel over which one should wash and which one wipe them. “Maybe you think a man doesn’t know how to wash dishes,” Felix said belligerently. “No,” said Rose-Ann, “but I think a woman might have the privilege of washing dishes in her own house.... Felix, I wish this were our own house! I shall hate to go back to town after this.... But don’t let’s think about that now. All right, selfish, you can wash the dishes!” The thought frightened Felix a little. A house of their own! A house in the country! How beautiful, and yet how—but no, nothing seemed impossible now.... They could plan for it, and work for it, and at last have it, together.... 3 “Read me some poetry, Felix,” said Rose-Ann, after dinner, as they lay drowsily, in a great warm nest of cushions, in front of the fire in the room upstairs. He stirred himself, and then relaxed. Rose-Ann’s head was nestled in the hollow under his shoulder, and her red-gold hair, unbound, flowed across her bosom and touched his caressing hand. He was altogether too happily situated at this moment to want to go downstairs and look for a book of poems. Besides, why need he? “_And frosts are slain and flowers begotten._” he began. She closed her eyes, and from her quiet breathing one might have thought her asleep. But once when he faltered, forgetting the words, Rose-Ann murmured them softly: “_And frosts are slain and flowers begotten._” He took it up, in his voice of subdued chanting: “_And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins...._” and so to the end. “Say me some more,” she breathed. “Like that. Anything with woods or flowers in it.” He began quoting, mischievously filling in words to make up the rhythm where he forgot the original: “_Iris all hues, roses and jessamine.... In shadier bower.... (I forget! But here it was) With flowers, garlands and sweet-smelling herbs Espoused Eve decked first her nuptial bed.... Yes Eve! In naked beauty more adorned, More lovely than Pandora. (So Milton says!)_ “I can’t remember just how it goes, but there are some lovely things in that old Puritan’s blood-and-thunder epic.... “_These, lulled by nightingales, embracing slept, And on their naked limbs the flowery roof Showered roses. (She’s asleep!)_”