"I'd forgotten what I'd heard about him," rejoined Laura, shaking her
head.

They had reached a crossing, and he dropped a little behind her while
she walked on with the flowing yet energetic step she had inherited from
her Southern mother. On the opposite corner he came up with her again
and resumed the conversation where they had let it fall.

"I never see Kemper now," he said, "but I still feel that we are friends
in a way, and I believe if I were to run across him to-morrow he'd be
quite as glad to see me as if we hadn't parted fifteen years ago. The
last time I saw much of him, by the way, we roughed it together one
autumn on the coast of Nova Scotia, and I remember he volunteered there
to go out in the first heavy gale to bring in some fishermen who had
been caught out in the ice. They tied a rope around his waist and he
went and brought the men in, too, though we feared for a time that his
hands would be frozen off."

"Oh, I dare say he has pluck," observed Laura, and though her voice was
constrained, she was conscious of a sudden moral exhilaration, such as
she sometimes experienced after reading a great poem or seeing a
Shakespearian tragedy upon the stage. The lights and the noises and the
people in the street became singularly vivid, while she moved on in an
excitement which she could not explain though she felt that it was
wholly pleasurable. Kemper was present to her now in a nobler, almost a
glorified, aspect, and she began, though she herself was hardly aware of
it, to idealise him with the fatal ardour of a poet and a dreamer. There
was a splendour to her in his old heroic deed--a glow that transfigured,
like some clear northern light, the storm and the danger and even the