`Too much,' he answered quietly.
She clung a little closer.
`Not too much,' she pleaded.
`Far too much,' he said, almost sadly.
`And does it make you sad, that I am everything to you?' she asked, wistful. He held her close to him, kissing her, and saying, scarcely audible:
`No, but I feel like a beggar -- I feel poor.'
She was silent, looking at the stars now. Then she kissed him.
`Don't be a beggar,' she pleaded, wistfully. `It isn't ignominious that you love me.'
`It is ignominious to feel poor, isn't it?' he replied.
`Why? Why should it be?' she asked. He only stood still, in the terribly cold air that moved invisibly over the mountain tops, folding her round with his arms.
`I couldn't bear this cold, eternal place without you,' he said. `I couldn't bear it, it would kill the quick of my life.'
She kissed him again, suddenly.
`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 sun-sparks, tiny and orange in the midst of the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow of a peak, blotting out the stars, like a ghost.
They drew near to their home. They saw a man come from the dark building, with a lighted lantern which swung golden, and made that his dark feet walked in a halo of snow. He was a small, dark figure in the darkened snow. He unlatched the door of an outhouse. A smell of cows, hot, animal, almost like beef, came out on the heavily cold air. There was a glimpse of two cattle in their dark stalls, then the door was shut again, and not a chink of light showed. It had reminded Ursula again of home, of the Marsh, of her childhood, and of the journey to Brussels, and, strangely, of Anton Skrebensky.
Oh, God, could one bear it, this past which was gone down the abyss? Could she bear, that it ever had been! She looked round this silent, upper world of snow and stars and powerful cold. There was another world, like views on a magic lantern; The Marsh, Cossethay, Ilkeston, lit up with a common, unreal light. There was a shadowy unreal Ursula, a whole shadow-play of an unreal life. It was as unreal, and circumscribed, as a magic-lantern show. She wished the slides could all be broken. She wished it could be gone for ever, like a lantern-slide which was broken. She wanted to have no past. She wanted to