some deep wicker chairs, and roses in a riot of bloom.

"This is--enchanting--" said Olaf. He did not sit down at once. He stood
looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale's jaw lying bleached
on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us.
"It is enchanting. Do you know, I have been thinking myself very
fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning."

After that it was all very easy. He asked and I answered. "You see," he
explained, finally, "I am hungry for anything that tells me about the
sea. Three generations back we were all sailors--my great-grandfather
and his fathers before him in Norway--and far back of that--the
vikings." He drew a long breath. "Then my grandfather came to America.
He settled in the West--in Dakota, and planted grain. He made money, but
he was a thousand miles away from the sea. He starved for it, but he
wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it. And my father made more
money. Then I came. The money took me to school in the East--to
college. My mother died and my father. And now the money is my own. I
bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water. I can't get enough of it.
I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather
denied themselves."

I can't in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a
tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he
finished up with a little laugh. "You see," he said, "I am a sort of
Flying Dutchman--sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister
force but by my own delight in it."

"Do you go alone?"