her real self.  Her imagination beat the bars of the cage of convention in which she had imprisoned it, and cried out for free, large, natural emotions—­those that make the blood leap and the flesh tingle, that put music in the voice and softness in the glance and the intense joy of life in the heart.  And she began to revolve him before eyes that searched hopefully for possibilities of his giving her precisely what her nerves craved.

“It would be queer, wouldn’t it,” she mused—­she was watching him swim—­“if it should turn out that I had come up here to learn, instead of to teach?”

And he—­In large presences he was always at his best—­in the large situations of affairs, in these large, tranquillizing horizons of nature.  He, too, began to forget that she was a refined, delicate, sensitive lady, with nerves that writhed under breaks in manners and could in no wise endure a slip in grammar, unless, of course, it was one of those indorsed by fashionable usage.  His health came flooding and roaring back in its fullness; and day by day the difficulty of restraining himself from loud laughter and strong, plebeian action became more appalling to him.  He would leave the camp, set off at a run as soon as he got safely out of sight; and, when he was sure of seclusion in distance, he would “cut loose”—­ yell and laugh and caper like a true madman; tear off his superfluous clothes, splash and thresh in some lonely lake like a baby whale that has not yet had the primary lessons in how to behave.  When he returned to camp, subdued in manner, like a bad boy after recess, he was, in fact, not one bit subdued beneath the surface, but the more fractious for his outburst.  Each day his animal spirits surged higher; each day her sway of awe and respect grew more precarious.  She thought his increasing silence, his really ridiculous formality of politeness, his stammering and red-cheeked dread of intrusion meant a deepening of the sense of the social gulf that rolled between them.  She recalled their conversation about his relatives.  “Poor fellow!” thought she.  “I suppose it’s quite impossible for people of my sort to realize what a man of his birth and bringing up feels in circumstances like these.”  Little did she dream, in her exaltation of self-complacence and superiority, that the “poor fellow’s” clumsy formalities were the thin cover for a tempest of wild-man’s wild emotion.

Curiously, she “got on” his nerves before he on hers.  It was through her habit of rising late and taking hours to dress.  Part of his code of conduct—­an interpolation of his own into the Arkwright manual for a honeymooning gentleman—­was that he ought to wait until she was ready to breakfast, before breakfasting himself.  Several mornings she heard tempestuous sounds round the camp for two hours before she emerged from her room.  She knew these sounds came from him, though all was quiet as soon as she appeared; and she very soon thought out the reason for his uproar.  Next, his anger could not subdue itself beyond surliness on her appearing, and the surliness lasted through the first part of breakfast.  Finally, one morning she heard him calling her when she was about half-way through her leisurely toilette:  “Margaret!  Margaret!”