Nancy, crossing the threshold, said to Olaf, who had opened the door for us, “It is like coming into another world; as if you had set the stage, run up the curtain, and the play had begun.”

“You like it?  It was a fancy of mine to copy a description I found in an old book.  King Olaf, the Thick-set, furnished a room like this for his bride.”

Olaf, the Thick-set!  The phrase fitted perfectly this strong, stocky, blue-eyed man, who smiled radiantly upon us as he shut the door and left us alone.

Nancy stood in the middle of the room looking about her.  “I like it,” she said, with a queer shake in her voice.  “Don’t you, Elizabeth?”

I liked it so much that I felt it wise to hide my pleasure in a pretense of indifference.  “Well, it is original to say the least.”

But it was more than original, it was poetic.  It was—­Melisande in the wood—­one of Sinding’s haunting melodies, an old Saga caught and fixed in color and carving.

In this glowing room Nancy in her white and gray was a cold and incongruous figure, and when at last she donned her dull cap, and the dull cloak that she wore over her swimming costume, she seemed a ghostly shadow of the bright bride whom that other Olaf had brought—­a thousand years before—­to his strange old ship.

I realize that what comes hereafter in this record must seem to the unimaginative overdrawn.  Even now, as I look back upon it, it has a dream quality, as if it might never have happened, or as if, as Nancy had said, it was part of a play, which would be over when the curtain was rung down and the actors had returned to the commonplace.

But the actors in this drama have never returned to the commonplace.  Or have they?  Shall I ever know?  I hope I may never know, if Nancy and Olaf have lost the glamour of their dreams.

Well, we found Olaf on deck waiting for us.  In a sea-blue tunic, with strong white arms, and the dazzling fairness of his strong neck, he was more than ever like the figurehead on the old ship that I had seen in my childhood.  He carried over his arm a cloak of the same sea-blue.  It was this cloak which afterward played an important part in the mystery of Nancy’s disappearance.

His quick glance swept Nancy—­the ghostly Nancy in gray, with only the blue of her eyes, and that touch of artificial pink in her cheeks to redeem her from somberness.  He shook his head with a gesture of impatience.

“I don’t like it,” he said, abruptly.  “Why do you deaden your beauty with dull colors?”

Nancy’s eyes challenged him.  “If it is deadened, how do you know it is beauty?”

“May I show you?” Again there was that tense excitement which I had noticed in the garden.

“I don’t know what you mean,” yet in that moment the color ran up from her neck to her chin, the fixed pink spots were lost in a rush of lovely flaming blushes.

For with a sudden movement he had snatched off her cap, and had thrown the cloak around her.  The transformation was complete.  It was as if he had waved a wand.  There she stood, the two long, thick braids, which she had worn pinned close under her cap, falling heavily like molten metal to her knees, the blue cloak covering her—­heavenly in color, matching her eyes, matching the sea, matching the sky, matching the eyes of Olaf.