“They have caught us in the wind,” she said, holding out her hand to him.  “Come, Philip.  I want you to love my beasts.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

After a little the trail through the thick spruce grew narrow and dark, and Josephine went ahead of Philip.  He followed so close that he could reach out a hand and touch her.  She had not replaced her hood.  Her face was flushed and her lips parted and red when she turned to him now and then.  His heart beat with a tumultuous joy as he followed.  A few moments before he had not spoken to her boastfully, or to keep up a falling spirit.  He had given voice to what was in his heart, what was there now, telling him that she belonged to him, that she loved him, that there could be nothing in the world that would long stand between them.

The voice of the pack came to them stronger each moment, yet for a space it was unheard by him.  His mind—­all the senses he possessed—­travelled no farther than the lithesome red and gold figure ahead of him.  The thick strands of her braid had become partly undone, covering her waist and hips in a shimmering veil of gold.  He wanted to touch that rare treasure with his hands.  He was filled with the desire to stop her, and hold her close in his arms.  And yet he knew that this was a thing which he must not do.  For him she had risen above a thing merely physical.  The touching of her hair, her lips, her face, were no longer the first passions of love with him.  And because Josephine knew these things rose the joyous flush in her face and the wonder-light in her eyes.  The still, deep forests had long ago brought her dreams of this man.  And these same forests seemed to whisper to Philip that her beauty was a part of her soul, and that it was not to be desecrated in such moments of desire as he was fighting back in himself now.

Suddenly she ran a little ahead of him, and then stopped.  A moment later he stood at her side.  They were peering into what looked like a great, dimly lighted and carpeted hall.  For the space of a hundred feet in diameter the spruce had been thinned out.  The trees that remained were lopped of their lower branches, leaving their upper parts crowding in a dense shelter that shut out cold and storm.  No snow had filtered through their tops, and on the ground lay cedar and balsam needles two inches deep, a brown and velvety carpet that shone with the deep lustre of a Persian rug.

The place was filled with moving shapes and with gleaming eyes that were half fire in the gloom.  Here were leashed the forty fierce and wolfish beasts of the pack.  The dogs had ceased their loud clamour, and at sight of Josephine and sound of her voice, as she cried out greeting to them, there ran through the whole space a whining and a clinking of chains, and with that a snapping of jaws that sent a momentary shiver up Philip’s back.

Josephine took him by the hand now.  With him she ran in among them, calling out their names, laughing with them, caressing the shaggy heads that were thrust against her—­until it seemed to Philip that every beast in the pit was straining at the end of his chain to get at them and rend them into pieces.  And yet, above this thought, the nervousness that he could not fight it out of himself, rose the wonder of it all.