"Glorious! beyond all expectation, glorious!" he murmured half
aloud, as he consulted his watch and saw that the hands marked
exactly twelve on the dial. "I believe I'm having the best of it,
after all. Even if those fellows get the Eulalie into good position
they will see nothing finer than this."

As he spoke he raised his field-glass and swept the horizon in
search of a vessel, his own pleasure yacht,--which had taken three
of his friends, at their special desire, to the opposite island of
Seiland,--Seiland, rising in weird majesty three thousand feet above
the sea, and boasting as its chief glory the great peak of Jedke,
the most northern glacier in all the wild Norwegian land. There was
no sign of a returning sail, and he resumed his study of the
sumptuous sky, the colors of which were now deepening and burning
with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds of the deepest
purple hue, swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as though to
form his footstool.

"One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded,
and that all this aerial pomp,--this strange silence,--was just the
pause, the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused,
with a half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet
at heart, he was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with
modern fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or
Resurrection trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and
romance in his nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the
chilly dullness of English materialism had been able to eradicate.
And there was something impressive in the sight of the majestic orb
holding such imperial revel at midnight,--something almost unearthly
in the light and life of the heavens, as compared with the