Then he woke up and looked at the light. The curtains were drawn. He listened to the loud wild calling of blackbirds and thrushes in the wood. It would be a brilliant morning, about half past five, his hour for rising. He had slept so fast! It was such a new day! The woman was still curled asleep and tender. His hand moved on her, and she opened her blue wondering eyes, smiling unconsciously into his face.
`Are you awake?' she said to him.
He was looking into her eyes. He smiled, and kissed her. And suddenly she roused and sat up.
`Fancy that I am here!' she said.
She looked round the whitewashed little bedroom with its sloping ceiling and gable window where the white curtains were closed. The room was bare save for a little yellow-painted chest of drawers, and a chair: and the smallish white bed in which she lay with him.
`Fancy that we are here!' she said, looking down at him. He was lying watching her, stroking her breasts with his fingers, under the thin nightdress. When he was warm and smoothed out, he looked young and handsome. His eyes could look so warm. And she was fresh and young like a flower.
`I want to take this off!' she said, gathering the thin batiste nightdress and pulling it over her head. She sat there with bare shoulders and longish breasts faintly golden. He loved to make her breasts swing softly, like bells.
`You must take off your pyjamas too,' she said.
`Eh, nay!'
`Yes! Yes!' she commanded.
And he took off his old cotton pyjama-jacket, and pushed down the trousers. Save for his hands and wrists and face and neck he was white as milk, with fine slender muscular flesh. To Connie he was suddenly piercingly beautiful again, as when she had seen him that afternoon washing himself.
Gold of sunshine touched the closed white curtain. She felt it wanted to come in.
`Oh, do let's draw the curtains! The birds are singing so! Do let the sun in,' she said.
He slipped out of bed with his back to her, naked and white and thin, and went to the window, stooping a little, drawing the curtains and looking out for a moment. The back was white and fine, the small buttocks beautiful with an exquisite, delicate manliness, the back of the neck ruddy and delicate and yet strong.
There was an inward, not an outward strength in the delicate fine body.
`But you are beautiful!' she said. `So pure and fine! Come!' She held her arms out.
He was ashamed to turn to her, because of his aroused nakedness.
He caught his shirt off the floor, and held it to him, coming to her.
`No!' she said still holding out her beautiful slim arms from her dropping breasts. `Let me see you!'
He dropped the shirt and stood still looking towards her. The sun through the low window sent in a beam that lit up his thighs and slim belly and the erect phallos rising darkish and hot-looking from the little cloud of vivid gold-red hair. She was startled and afraid.
`How strange!' she said slowly. `How strange he stands there! So big! and so dark and cock-sure! Is he like that?'