ton balanced himself lightly on the ladder and smiled.

"I am sure, Sigurd! I have no wish to sail away. Are you all right
there?"

He spoke cheerily, feeling in his own mind that it was scarcely safe for
a madman to be quite alone in a cockle-shell of a boat on a deep Fjord,
the shores of which were indented with dangerous rocks as sharp as the
bristling teeth of fabled sea-monsters, but Sigurd answered him almost
contemptuously.

"All right!" he echoed. "That is what the English say always. All right!
As if it were ever wrong with me, and the sea! We know each other,--we
do each other no harm. _You_ may die on the sea, but _I_ shall not! No,
there is another way to Valhalla!"

"Oh, I dare say there are no end of ways," said Errington
good-temperedly, still poising himself on the ladder, and holding on to
the side of his yacht, as he watched his late visitor take the oars and
move off. "Good-bye, Sigurd! Take care of yourself! Hope I shall see you
again soon."

But Sigurd replied not. Bending to the oars, he rowed swiftly and
strongly, and Sir Philip, pulling up the ladder and closing the gangway,
saw the little skiff flying over the water like a bird in the direction
of the Gueldmar's landing-place. He wondered again and again what
relationship, if any, this half-crazed being bore to the _bonde_ and his
daughter. That he knew all about them was pretty evident; but how?
Catching sight of the pansies left on the deck bench, Errington took
them, and, descending to the saloon, set them on the table in a tumbler
of water.

"Thelma's thoughts, the poor little fellow called them," he mused, with
a smile. "A pretty fancy of his, and linked with the crazy imaginings of
Ophelia too. 'There's pansies, that's for thoughts,' _she_ said, but
Sigurd's idea is different; he believes they are Thelma's own thoughts
in flower. 'No rough touch has spoiled their smoothness,' he declared;
he's right there, I'm sure. And shall I ruffle the sweet leaves; shall I
crush the tender petals? or shall I simply transform them, from pansies
into roses,--from the dream of love,--into love itself?"

His eyes softened as he glanced at the drooping rose he wore, which
Thelma herself had given him, and as he went to his sleeping cabin, he
carefully detached it from his button-hole, and taking down a book,--one
which he greatly prized, because it had belonged to his mother,--he
prepared to press the flower within its leaves. It was the "Imitation