Nobody spoke at first, as though we had been covered with confusion.  His arrival was fiery, but his white bulk, of indefinite shape and without features, made him loom up like a man of snow.

“The captain here has been telling me . . .”  Hermann began in a homely and amicable voice; and Falk had a low, nervous laugh.  His cool, negligent undertone had no inflexions, but the strength of a powerful emotion made him ramble in his speech.  He had always desired a home.  It was difficult to live alone, though he was not answerable.  He was domestic; there had been difficulties; but since he had seen Hermann’s niece he found that it had become at last impossible to live by himself.  “I mean—­impossible,” he repeated with no sort of emphasis and only with the slightest of pauses, but the word fell into my mind with the force of a new idea.

“I have not said anything to her yet,” Hermann observed quietly.  And Falk dismissed this by a “That’s all right.  Certainly.  Very proper.”  There was a necessity for perfect frankness—­in marrying, especially.  Hermann seemed attentive, but he seized the first opportunity to ask us into the cabin.  “And by-the-by, Falk,” he said innocently, as we passed in, “the timber came to no less than forty-seven dollars and fifty cents.”

Falk, uncovering his head, lingered in the passage.  “Some other time,” he said; and Hermann nudged me angrily—­I don’t know why.  The girl alone in the cabin sat sewing at some distance from the table.  Falk stopped short in the doorway.  Without a word, without a sign, without the slightest inclination of his bony head, by the silent intensity of his look alone, he seemed to lay his herculean frame at her feet.  Her hands sank slowly on her lap, and raising her clear eyes, she let her soft, beaming glance enfold him from head to foot like a slow and pale caress.  He was very hot when he sat down; she, with bowed head, went on with her sewing; her neck was very white under the light of the lamp; but Falk, hiding his face in the palms of his hands, shuddered faintly.  He drew them down, even to his beard, and his uncovered eyes astonished me by their tense and irrational expression—­as though he had just swallowed a heavy gulp of alcohol.  It passed away while he was binding us to secrecy.  Not that he cared, but he did not like to be spoken about; and I looked at the girl’s marvellous, at her wonderful, at her regal hair, plaited tight into that one astonishing and maidenly tress.  Whenever she moved her well-shaped head it would stir stiffly to and fro on her back.  The thin cotton sleeve fitted the irreproachable roundness of her arm like a skin; and her very dress, stretched on her bust, seemed to palpitate like a living tissue with the strength of vitality animating her body.  How good her complexion was, the outline of her soft cheek and the small convoluted conch of her rosy ear!  To pull her needle she kept the little finger apart from the others; it seemed a waste of power to see