"Do you ever find yourself homesick, Samson, these days?" The man answered with a short laugh. Then, his words came softly, and not his own words, but those of one more eloquent: "'Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather "'Than the forecourts of kings, and her uttermost pits than the streets where men gather.... "'His Sea that his being fulfills? "'So and no otherwise--"so and no otherwise hillmen desire their hills.'" "And yet," she said, and a trace of the argumentative stole into her voice, "you haven't gone back." "No." There was a note of self-reproach in his voice. "But soon I shall go. At least, for a time. I've been thinking a great deal lately about 'my fluttered folk and wild.' I'm just beginning to understand my relation to them, and my duty." "Your duty is no more to go back there and throw away your life," she found herself instantly contending, "than it is the duty of the young eagle, who has learned to fly, to go back to the nest where he was hatched." "But, Drennie," he said, gently, "suppose the young eagle is the only one that knows how to fly--and suppose he could teach the others? Don't you see? I've only seen it myself for a little while." "What is it that--that you see now?" "I must go back, not to relapse, but to come to be a constructive force. I must carry some of the outside world to Misery. I must take to them, because I am one of them, gifts that they would reject from other hands." "Will they accept them even from you?" "Drennie, you once said that, if I grew ashamed of my people, ashamed even of their boorish manners, their ignorance, their crudity, you would have no use for me." "I still say that," she answered. "Well, I'm not ashamed of them. I went through that, but it's over." She sat silent for a while, then cried suddenly: "I don't want you to go!" The moment she had said it, she caught herself with a nervous little laugh, and added a postscript of whimsical nonsense to disarm her utterance of its telltale feeling. "Why, I'm just getting you civilized, yourself. It took years to get your hair cut." He ran his palm over his smoothly trimmed head, and laughed. "Delilah, Oh, Delilah!" he said. "I was resolute, but you have shorn me." "Don't!" she exclaimed. "Don't call me that!" "Then, Drennie, dear," he answered, lightly, "don't dissuade me from the most decent resolve I have lately made." From the house came the strains of an alluring waltz. For a little time, they listened without speech, then the girl said very gravely: "You won't--you won't still feel bound to kill your enemies, will you, Samson?" The man's face hardened.