"You know I was never in a man's arms before." "And you didn't like it?" he asked, with a smile playing around his mouth. "To tell you the truth, I found it very awkward." "Awkward?" he laughed. "And exciting," she confessed. "Shall we repeat it until you are used to it?" "Thank you, I'm sufficiently amused for to-day," she answered, soberly. "And now we will put on our shoes and be good children." For the rest of the journey Norman found her strangely silent. Now and then he caught her looking at him furtively out of her big brown eyes, as if she had just met him and was half afraid to go further. He found himself particularly sensitive to her moods. The moment she became silent and thoughtful her impulses ruled his, and not a word was spoken for a mile. Scarcely two sentences passed between them until they reached the summit of the range and sat down on the cliff overhanging the sea. This cliff was one of the numerous headlands which thrust their peaks in almost perpendicular lines sheer into the ocean. They sat for an hour and drank in the peace and solemn grandeur of the infinite blue expanse. "What a little world, the one in which we live down there and fret and fume," he whispered. "The one we think so big when in the thick of the fight! We forget the dim expanse of ocean kissing ocean--encircling the earth--of the skies that kiss the sea and lead on and on into those great silent deeps where a universe of worlds roll in grandeur!" "Yet isn't man greater than all these worlds?" she asked, with sudden elation. "If he is a man, yes; a real man with the conscious divine power in his soul which says, I will! Isn't that the only power worth having? The herd of cattle we call men, whose souls have never spoken that divine word of character and of action--are they men? Have they souls at all? Is it worth the while of those who have to fret and fuss and fume trying to make something out of nothing?" Barbara turned suddenly, looked into Norman's eyes, and asked in anxious tones: "What do you mean?" "That I'm thinking of giving up this experiment." "Now that you are just making it a marvellous success?" "But is it a success? What is the good of achievement for any community if that achievement springs from the will of one man? If their souls are in subjection to his, has he not degraded them? Is life inside or outside? Are we Socialists not struggling merely with what is outside? Are we not in reality struggling back into the primitive savage herd out of which individual manhood has slowly emerged? I'm puzzled. I'm afraid to go on. I've asked you to come up here to-day to tell me what to do." Barbara's breath came quick. "You wish me to decide the momentous question of our colony? Perhaps the future of humanity?"