“I’ve heard it’s because we make such a fetish of success.” Still he lay there silent. It was as if the oil in the lamp had failed. “Yes, yours was a good plan,” she said. “Even those others, the Old-World people, that they say are soberer than we—” She saw that he turned his hollow eyes toward her, listening. “If even they made excuses, and shirked saying they’d failed—yours was the best— Oh, it was a splendid plan!” “Are you saying we’re a nation of boasters?” Good! that had roused him. “Do you say we are not?” “We are everything under the sun: most vain and braggart; most discreet and self-effacing; most childish and obvious; most subtle and complex. The extreme of anything, good or evil, that’s the American.” His eyes found out the tiny watch face on the peat wall. Ah, that was the tonic that was acting like a cordial mixed with magic. Right or wrong, he was under the dominion of a terror that this last flickering up of energy would fail before he had turned it to account. Even to remember that small shining disk seemed to nerve him anew. Each look a lash. It whipped him on. “As I’ve said, my Tatar and I laid our heads together and agreed. ‘For fear we fall into the old snare, we won’t say we’re going at all,’ not even to find Nansen, for fear we should promise too much. We would make the great attempt under the guise of a whaling expedition. My Russian had already sent out two, and had once gone along with one of them. I had spent a winter with the Samoyedes.” “What! _You_ did that?” His eyes, though not his mind, took in the girl’s breathless agitation. He paused, but his thoughts were too far away. “I thought only one man had ever—” began the girl trembling, and then: “Go on; go on!” “We were both still young. Yes, six years ago I was young; and hard as a husky. But not so hard as a man need be who goes exploring in the mild climate of the drawing-room.” Hildegarde bent toward him, with wildly beating heart. “We were just on the point of chartering our ship, when one evening—” He looked through the peat wall a thousand leagues. “One evening—what?” “I saw a face. A girl’s soft face, but it cut the cables of my ship and set her afloat—drifting, derelict, for all I cared. A little doll’s face. But it shut out everything else under the skies!” Oh, Bella, Bella, was it yours—that face? “Go on,” breathed the girl at the door. “When her people said she should never marry a man who might any day go off on one of these protracted voyages, I looked at the face, and I said I would never explore again.” The glazed eyes turned to Hildegarde, but it was the old bright vision they saw, not this newer, softer presence, with wet cheeks, by the door.