clear the air was! It was like looking through a crystal lens--every
leaf seemed to stand out vividly. Sounds came up to me with marvellous
distinctness. Summer was coming, and with it the assurance of a new
peace. Down there I could see our home, and on its veranda,
hammock-swung, the white figure of Berna. How precious she was to me!
How anxiously I watched over her! A look, a word meant more to me than
volumes. If she was happy I was full of joy; if she was sad the sunshine
paled, the flowers drooped, there was no gladness in the day. Often as
she slept I watched her, marvelling at the fine perfection of her face.
Always was she an object of wonder to me--something to be adored, to
demand all that was fine and high in me.

Yet sometimes it was the very intensity of my love that made me fear; so
that in the ecstasy of a moment I would catch my breath and wonder if it
all could last. And always the memory of Locasto was a sinister shadow.
He had gone "outside," terribly broken in health, gone cursing me
hoarsely and vowing he would return. Would he?

Who that knows the North can ever deny its lure? Wherever you be, it
will call and call to you. In the sluggish South you will hear it, will
long for the keen tingle of its silver days, the vaster glory of its
star-strewn nights. In the city's heart it will come to you till you
hunger for its big, clean spaces, its racing rivers, its purple tundras.
In the homes of the rich its voice will seek you out, and you will ache
for your lonely camp-fire, a sunset splendouring to golden death, the
night where the silence clutches and the heavens vomit forth white fire.
Yes, you will hear it, and hear it, till a madness comes over you, till
you leave the crawling men of the sticky pavements to seek it out once
more, the sapphire of its lustrous lakes, the white yearning of its
peaks to the myriad stars. Then, as a child comes home, will you come
home. And I knew that some day to the land wherein he had reigned a
conqueror, Locasto, too, would return.

As I looked down on the grey town, the wonder of its growth came over
me. How changed from the muddle of tents and cabins, the boat-lined
river, the swarming hordes of the Argonauts! Where was the niggerhead
swamp, the mud, the unrest, the mad fever of '98? I looked for these
things and saw in their stead fine residences, trim gardens, well-kept
streets. I almost rubbed my eyes as I realised the magic of the
transformation.

And g