"Oh, I should like to explore," she murmured, as she looked at them. "I should like to lead an expedition to uncover ancient cities, somewhere in Egypt, or India, or Yucatan. I should like to find things right where they were left by the people who last saw them--not here, all arranged and classified, with numbers pasted on them. If I were a man, I should be an explorer, or maybe a discoverer of new lands--places where no one had ever been before." She turned to him eagerly, "Why don't you become an explorer, and find old cities or--or the North Pole, or something?" Mr. Weatherby, who was studying a fine scarab, nodded. "I have thought of it, I believe. I think the idea appealed to me once. But, don't you see, it takes a kind of genius for those things. Discoverers are born, I imagine, as well as poets. Besides"--he lowered his voice to a pitch that was meant for tenderness--"at the North Pole I should be so far from you--unless," he added, reflectively, "we went there on our wedding journey." "Which we are as likely to do as to go anywhere," she said, rather crossly. They passed through the corridor of statuary and up the stairway to wander among the paintings of masters old and young. By a wall where the works of Van Dyck, Rembrandt and Velasquez hung, she turned on him reproachfully. "These men have left something behind them," she commented--"something which the world will preserve and honor. What will you leave behind you?" "I fear it won't be a picture," he said humbly. "I can't imagine one of my paintings being hung here or any place else. They might hang the painter, of course, though not just here, I fancy." In another room they lingered before a painting of a boy and a girl driving home the cows--Israel's "Bashful Suitor." The girl contemplated it through half-closed lids. "You did not look like that," she said. "You were a self-possessed big boy, with smart clothes, and an air of ownership that comes of having a lot of money. You were a good-hearted boy, rather impulsive, I should think, but careless and spoiled. Had Israel chosen you it would have been the girl who was timid, not you." He laughed easily. "Now, how can you possibly know what I looked like as a boy?" he demanded. "Perhaps I was just such a slim, diffident little chap as that one. Time works miracles, you know." "But even time has its limitations. I know perfectly well how you looked at that boy's age. Sometimes I see boys pass along in front of the house, and I say: 'There, he was just like that!'" Frank felt his heart grow warm. It seemed to him that her confession showed a depth of interest not acknowledged before. "I'll try to make amends, Constance," he said, "by being a little nearer what you would like to have me now," and could not help adding, "only you'll have to decide just what particular thing you want me to be, and please don't have the North Pole in it."