“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 night dress. 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!” he said, gathering the thin batiste night dress 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.