"And you are glad?" she asked softly and with a sort of wonder in her accents.
"Glad to know your name? glad to know you! Of course! Can you ask such a question?"
"But why?" persisted Thelma. "It is not as if you were lonely,—you have friends already. We are nothing to you. Soon you will go away, and you will think of the Altenfjord as a dream,—and our names will be forgotten. That is natural!"
What a foolish rush of passion filled his heart as she spoke in those mellow, almost plaintive accents,—what wild words leaped to his lips and what an effort it cost him to keep them hack. The heat and impetuosity of Romeo,—whom up to the present he had been inclined to consider a particularly stupid youth,—was now quite comprehensible to his mind, and he, the cool, self-possessed Englishman, was ready at that moment to outrival Juliet's lover, in his utmost excesses of amorous folly. In spite of his self-restraint, his voice quivered a little as he answered her—
"I shall never forget the Altenfjord or you, Miss Güldmar. Don't you know there are some things that cannot be forgotten? such as a sudden glimpse of fine scenery,—a beautiful song, or a pathetic poem?" She bent her head in assent. "And here there is so much to remember—the light of the midnight sun,—the glorious mountains, the loveliness of the whole land!"
"Is it better than other countries you have seen?" asked the girl with some interest.
"Much better!" returned Sir Philip fervently. "In fact, there is no place like it in my opinion." He paused at the sound of her pretty laughter.
"You are—what is it?—ecstatic!" she said mirthfully. "Tell me, have you been to the south of France and the Pyrenees?"
"Of course I have," he replied. "I have been all over the Continent,—travelled about it till I'm tired of it. Do you like the south of France better than Norway?"
"No,—not so very much better," she said dubiously. "And yet a little. It is so warm and bright there, and the people are gay. Here they are stern and sullen. My father loves to sail the seas, and when I first went to school at Arles, he took me a long and beautiful voyage. We went from Christiansund to Holland, and saw all those pretty Dutch cities with their canals and quaint bridges. Then we went through the English Channel to Brest,—then by the Bay of Biscay to Bayonne. Bayonne seemed to me very lovely, but we left it soon, and travelled a long way by land, seeing all sorts of wonderful things, till we came to Arles. And though it is such a long route, and not one for many persons to take, I have travelled to Arles and back twice that way, so all there is familiar to me,—and in some things I do think it better than Norway."