ment on her mutiny--she swept out of
the library and sat down at the piano in the other room, making a
picture of herself between the tall white candles which illumined the
dark mahogany and the mulberry brocades.

I leaned back in my chair and watched her, her white fingers straying
over the keys, her thin blue sleeves flowing back from her white arms.
Now and then I caught a familiar melody among the chords, and once I was
aware of the beat and the swing of the waves in the song which Olaf had
once sung.

She did not finish it. She rose and wandered to the window, parting the
curtain and looking out into the streaming night.

"It's an awful storm, Ducky."

"Yes, my dear. On nights like this I always think of the old days when
the men were on the sea, and the women waited."

"I'd rather think of my man on the sea, even if I had to wait for him,
Ducky, than shut up in office, stagnating."

The door-bell rang suddenly. It was a dreadful night for any one to be
out, but Anita, undisturbed and crisp in her white apron and cap, came
through the hall. A voice asked a question, and the blood began to pound
in my body. Things were blurred for a bit, and when my vision cleared--I
saw Olaf in the shine of the candles in the room beyond, with Nancy
crushed to him, his bright head bent, the sheer blue of her frock
infolding him--the archway of the door framing them like the figures of
saints in the stained glass of a church window!

I knew then that I had lost her. But she did not yield at once.

"I love him, of course. But a woman couldn't do a thing like that," was
the way she put it to me the next morning.

I felt, however, that Olaf would master her. Will was set against will,
mind against mind. And at last she showed him the way. "A thousand years
ago you would have carried me off."

I can see him now as he caught the idea and laughed at her. "Whether you
go of your own accord or I carry you, you will be happy." He lifted her
in his strong hands as if she were a feather, held her, kissed her, and
flashed a glance at me. "You see how easy it would be, and there's a
chaplain on board."

There is not much more to tell. Nancy went down one morning to the beach
for her bath--and the fog swallowed her up. I have often wondered
whether she planned it, or whether, knowing that she would be there, he
had come in his launch and had borne her away struggling, but not, I am
sure, unwilling. However it happened, the cloak wen