, with an incredulous laugh, glancing
alternately from Arnfinn to the knapsack, as if estimating their
proportionate weight. "I am afraid you would rue your bargain if I
accepted it."

"I suppose you have a great many stuffed birds at home," remarked the
girl, looking with self-forgetful admiration at the large brawny figure.

"No, I have hardly any," answered he, seating himself on the ground,
and pulling a thick note-book from his pocket. "I prefer live creatures.
Their anatomical and physiological peculiarities have been studied
by others, and volumes have been written about them. It is their
psychological traits, ii you will allow the expression, which interest
me, and those I can only get at while they are alive."

"How delightful!"

Some minutes later they were all on their way to the Parsonage. The sun,
in spite of its mid-summer wakefulness, was getting red-eyed and drowsy,
and the purple mists which hung in scattered fragments upon the forest
below had lost something of their deep-tinged brilliancy. But Augusta,
quite blind to the weakened light effects, looked out upon the broad
landscape in ecstasy, and, appealing to her more apathetic companions,
invited them to share her joy at the beauty of the faint-flushed summer
night.

"You are getting quite dithyrambic, my dear," remarked Arnfinn, with
an air of cousinly superiority, which he felt was eminently becoming to
him; and Augusta looked up with quick surprise, then smiled in an absent
way, and forgot what she had been saying. She had no suspicion but that
her enthusiasm had been all for the sunset.

III.

In a life so outwardly barren and monotonous as Augusta's--a life in
which the small external events were so firmly interwoven with the
subtler threads of yearnings, wants, and desires--the introduction of
so large and novel a fact as Marcus Strand would naturally produce some
perceptible result. It was that deplorable inward restlessness of hers,
she reasoned, which had hitherto made her existence seem so empty and
unsatisfactory; but now his presence filled the hours, and the newness
of his words, his manner, and his whole person afforded inexhaustible
material for thought. It was now a week since his arrival, and while
Arnfinn and Inga chatted at leisure, drew caricatures, or read aloud to
each other in some shady nook of the garden, she and Strand would roam
along the beach, filling the vast unclouded horizon with large
glowing images o