notted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.

"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake
the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the
gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the
sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see
we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've
gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
couldn't rest, even here. The war cry would follow you."

"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art
of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men."

"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
brilliant talker you know."

Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind
through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.

"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
interesting as Eric Hermannson?"

"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
fancy."

"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I
can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."

"Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget
as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but
I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a
soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_"

"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that it's
more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and he makes
it known, somehow, without speaking."

"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked, with
the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.

Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein
boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will in anybody. The
earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night
when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that
ye