“Why don’t you have sails then,” Nancy challenged him, “instead of steam?”

“I have a ship.  Shall I show you the picture of it?”

He left to get it, and Nancy said to me, “Ducky, will you pinch me?”

“You mean that it doesn’t seem real?”

She nodded.

“Well, maybe it isn’t.  He said he was a sort of Flying Dutchman.”

“I should hate to think that he wasn’t real, Elizabeth.  He is as alive as a—­burning coal.”

Olaf came back with the pictures of his ship, a clean-cut, beautiful craft, very up-to-date, except for the dragon-heads at prow and stem.

“If I could have had my way,” he told us, “I should have built it like the ship on the tapestry in there—­but it wasn’t practical—­we haven’t manpower for the oars in these days.”

He had other pictures—­of a strange house, or, rather, of a collection of buildings set in the form of a quadrangle, and inclosed by low walls.  There were great gateways of carved wood with ironwork and views of the interior—­a wide hall with fireplaces—­a raised platform, with carved seats that gave a throne-like effect.  The house stood on a sort of high peninsula with a forest back of it, and the sea spreading out beyond.

“The house looks old,” Olaf said, “but I planned it.”

He had, he explained, during one of his voyages, come upon a hidden harbor.  “There is only a fishing village and a few small boats at the landing place, but the people claim to be descendants of the vikings.  They are utterly isolated, but a God-fearing, hardy folk.

“It is strangely cut off from the rest of the world.  I call it ’The Hidden Land.’  It is not on any map.  I have looked and have not found it.”

“But why,” was Nancy’s demand, “did you build there?”

It was a question, I think, for which he had waited.  “Some day I may tell you, but not now, except this—­that I love the sea, and I shall end my days where, when I open my gates, my eyes may rest upon it ... where its storms may beat upon my roof, and where the men about me shall sail it, and get their living from it.

“I have told your cousin,” he went on, “something of the life of my grandfather and of my father.  With all of their sea-blood, they were shut away for two generations from the sea.  Can you grasp the meaning of that to me?—­the heritage of suppressed longings?  I think my father must have felt it as I did, for he drank heavily before he died.  My grandfather sought an outlet in founding the family fortunes.  But when I came, there was not the compelling force of poverty to make me work, and I had before me the warning of my father’s excesses.  But this sea-madness!  It has driven me on and on, and at last it has driven me here.”  He stopped, then took up the theme again in his tense, excited fashion, “It will drive me on again.”

“Why should it drive you on?”

When Nancy asked that question, I knew what had happened.  The thrill of her voice was the answer of a bird to its mate.  When I think of her, I see her always as she was then, the blue cloak falling about her, her hair blowing, her cheeks flaming with lovely color.