There is a beautiful Northern legend of a man who loved a good fairy,
and wooed her and won her for his wife, and then found that she was
no more than a woman after all. Grown weary, he turned his back upon
her and wandered away over the mountains; and there, on the other
side of a ravine from where he was, he saw, as he thought, another
fairy, who was lovely to look upon and played sweet music and sang a
sweet song. Then his heart was filled with joy and bitterness, and he
cried, "Oh, that the gods had given me this one to wife and not the
other." At that, with mighty effort and in great peril, he crossed
the ravine and made towards the fairy, and she fled from him; but he
ran and followed her and overtook her, and captured her and turned
her face to his face that he might kiss her, and lo! _she was his
wife!_

This old folk-tale is half my story--the play of emotions as sweet
and light as the footsteps of the shadows that flit over a field of
corn.

There is another Northern legend of a man who thought he was pursued
by a troll. His ricks were fired, his barns unroofed, his cattle
destroyed, his lands blasted, and his firstborn slain. So he lay in
wait for the monster where it lived in the chasms near his house, and
in the darkness of night he saw it. With a cry he rushed upon it, and
gripped it about the waist, and it turned upon him and held him by
the shoulder. Long he wrestled with it, reeling, staggering, falling
and rising again; but at length a flood of strength came to him and
he overthrew it, and stood over it, covering it, conquering it, with
his back across his thigh and his right hand set hard at its throat.
Then he drew his knife to kill it, and the moon shot through a rack
of cloud, opening an alley of light about it, and he saw its face,
and lo! _the face of the troll was his own!_

This is the other half of my story--the crash of passions as bracing
as a black thunderstorm.

CHAPTER I.

STEPHEN ORRY, SEAMAN, OF STAPPEN.

In the latter years of last century, H. Jorgen Jorgensen was
Governor-General of Iceland. He was a Dane, born in Copenhagen,
apprenticed to the sea on board an English trader, afterwards
employed as a petty officer in the British navy, and some time in the
command of a Danish privateer in an Alliance of Denmark and France
against England. A rover, a schemer, a shrewd man of affairs, who was
honest by way of interest, just by policy, generous by strategy, and
who never