hose eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these
details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line;
it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour
because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a
young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it
troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white
marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods.
At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury
seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing
and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms,
and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break
in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted
the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.

Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he
knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.

Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her
saddle.

"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she said.

Eric turned his eyes away.

"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music
like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work," he asked,
timidly.

Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
outline of his face, pityingly.

"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like you
to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be
altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's trunks
upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why
is it?_ "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn't like that."

"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.

Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a
trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.

"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance
with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they
say you know them all. Won't you?"

Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eye