fault. You 've been silent. Tell me more about what you 've seen and done."

"No, please," said Archer. "I've told you most of it. It's been a pretty dull life, sailing round; and yours is so much better." Walking behind her again, he could see the neat springing of her ankles, the free play of white-clad shoulders, the bronze gleams in her hair, blown away from him. But he was thinking of this childhood into which she had given him glimpses; and pity strove with admiration.

"The white birches I spoke of," she continued, gayly voluble, facing about and pointing, "see, there they are, behind, against the firs. You should see them in winter, too. Once, after a storm, they were all weighed down with ice till I was afraid they would break. But it was very beautiful—bending along together under the evergreens behind—and made me think of princesses in a fairy story, all stealing by the foot of a dark wall, you know, to escape."

They clattered across a frail foot-bridge, spanning a narrow black gorge, in which the