ould not accompany him. He sprang away like a frightened
animal, in haste, and abruptly plunging into the depths of a wood that
bordered on Olaf Gueldmar's grounds, was soon lost to sight. Lorimer
looked after him in a little perplexity.

"I wonder if he ever gets dangerous?" he thought. "A fellow with such
queer notions might do some serious harm without meaning it. I'll keep
an eye on him!"

And once or twice during that same evening, he felt inclined to speak to
Errington on the subject, but no suitable opportunity presented
itself--and after a while, with his habitual indolence, he partly forgot
the circumstance.

On the following Sunday afternoon Thelma sat alone under the wide
blossom-covered porch, reading. Her father and Sigurd,--accompanied by
Errington and his friends,--had all gone for a mountain ramble,
promising to return for supper, a substantial meal which Britta was
already busy preparing. The afternoon was very warm,--one of those long,
lazy stretches of heat and brilliancy in which Nature seems to have lain
down to rest like a child tired of play, sleeping in the sunshine with
drooping flowers in her hands. The very ripple of the stream seemed
hushed, and Thelma, though her eyes were bent seriously on the book she
held, sighed once or twice heavily as though she were tired. There was a
change in the girl,--an undefinable something seemed to have passed over
her and toned down the redundant brightness of her beauty. She was
paler,--and there were darker shadows than usual under the splendor of
her eyes. Her very attitude, as she leaned her head against the dark,
fantastic carving of the porch, had a touch of listlessness and
indifference in it; her sweetly arched lips drooped with a plaintive
little line at the corners, and her whole air was indicative of fatigue,
mingled with sadness. She looked up now and then from the printed page,
and her gaze wandered over the stretch of the scented, flower-filled
garden, to the little silvery glimmer of the Fjord from whence arose,
like delicate black streaks against the sky, the slender masts of the
_Eulalie_,--and then she would resume her reading with a slight movement
of impatience.

The volume she held was Victor Hugo's "Orientales," and though her
sensitive imagination delighted in poetry as much as in sunshine, she
found it for once hard to rivet her attention as closely as she wished
to do, on the exquisite wealth of language, and glow of color, that