“You are getting quite dithyrambic, my dear,” remarked Arnfinn, with an air of cousinly superiority, which he felt was eminently becoming to him; and Augusta looked up with quick surprise, then smiled in an absent way, and forgot what she had been saying. She had no suspicion but that her enthusiasm had been all for the sunset. III. In a life so outwardly barren and monotonous as Augusta’s--a life in which the small external events were so firmly interwoven with the subtler threads of yearnings, wants, and desires--the introduction of so large and novel a fact as Marcus Strand would naturally produce some perceptible result. It was that deplorable inward restlessness of hers, she reasoned, which had hitherto made her existence seem so empty and unsatisfactory; but now his presence filled the hours, and the newness of his words, his manner, and his whole person afforded inexhaustible material for thought. It was now a week since his arrival, and while Arnfinn and Inga chatted at leisure, drew caricatures, or read aloud to each other in some shady nook of the garden, she and Strand would roam along the beach, filling the vast unclouded horizon with large glowing images of the future of the human race. He always listened in sympathetic silence while she unfolded to him her often childishly daring schemes for the amelioration of suffering and the righting of social wrongs; and when she had finished, and he met the earnest appeal of her dark eye, there would often be a pause, during which each, with a half unconscious lapse from the impersonal, would feel more keenly the joy of this new and delicious mental companionship. And when at length he answered, sometimes gently refuting and sometimes assenting to her proposition, it was always with a slow, deliberate earnestness, as if he felt but her deep sincerity, and forgot for the moment her sex, her youth, and her inexperience. It was just this kind of fellowship for which she had hungered so long, and her heart went out with a great gratitude toward this strong and generous man, who was willing to recognize her humanity, and to respond with an ever-ready frankness, unmixed with petty suspicions and second thoughts, to the eager needs of her half-starved nature. It is quite characteristic, too, of the type of womanhood which Augusta represents (and with which this broad continent of ours abounds), that, with her habitual disregard of appearances, she would have scorned the notion that their intercourse had any ultimate end beyond that of mutual pleasure and instruction.