rself why
it was so fitting that the Viking should be a part of Vineland: why his
coming should have given it the one and final needful touch. For that
designation of Reginald Farwell's had come back to her. Despite the
fact that Hugh Chiltern had with such apparent resolution set his face
towards literature and the tillage of the land, it was as the Viking
still that her imagination pictured him. By these tokens we may perceive
that this faculty of our heroine's has been at work, and her canvas
already sketched in.

Whether by design or accident he was at the leafy entrance of her lane
she was not to know. She spied him standing there; and in her leisurely
approach a strange conceit of reincarnation possessed her, and she
smiled at the contrast thus summoned up. Despite the jingling harnesses
of Bellevue Avenue and the background of Mr. Chamberlin's palace wall;
despite the straw hat and white trousers and blue double-breasted serge
coat in which he was conventionally arrayed, he was the sea fighter
still--of all the ages. M. Vipsanius Agrippa, who had won an empire for
Augustus, had just such a head.

Their greeting, too, was conventional enough, and he turned and walked
with her up the lane, and halted before the lilacs. "You have Mrs.
Forsythe's house," he said. "How well I remember it! My mother used to
bring me here years ago."

"Won't you come in?" asked Honora, gently.

He seemed to have forgotten her as they mounted in silence to the porch,
and she watched him with curious feelings as he gazed about him, and
peered through the windows into the drawing-room.

"It's just as it was," he said. "Even the furniture. I'm glad you
haven't moved it. They used to sit over there in the corner, and have
tea on the ebony table. And it was always dark-just as it is now. I can
see them. They wore dresses with wide skirts and flounces, and queer low
collars and bonnets. And they talked in subdued voices--unlike so many
women in these days."

She was a little surprised, and moved, by the genuine feeling with which
he spoke.

"I was most fortunate to get the house," she answered. "And I have grown
to love it. Sometimes it seems as though I had always lived here."

"Then you don't envy that," he said, flinging his hand towards an
opening in the shrubbery which revealed a glimpse of one of the
pilasters of the palace across the way. The instinct of tradition which
had been the cause of Mrs. Forsythe's departure was in hi