Luckily, Power's acquaintance with the French language was close enough to enable him to appreciate the caustic humor of the words. He was far too absorbed then in the girl's vivid impressions of personalities familiar to him only in the columns of newspapers to indulge in speculation as to the why and the wherefore of this flow of anecdote and quaintly analytical glimpses of character. But he understood later. During three long years she had existed in an atmosphere that checked every natural impulse. She had become a statue, beautiful but impassive. Now she was once more a woman. The marble was coming to life. Love had breathed on her, and the red blood was flowing freely in her veins. He could have listened till dawn; but the sweet voice suddenly grew husky, and she expressed a desire to rest. "Derry," she said, with the unthinking confidence of a tired child, "let me lean my head on your shoulder. With your arm around me, I do believe I can forget even this dreadful lightning." Within a minute she was asleep. She merely smiled and murmured something about "putting the light out" when he laid her gently in a roughly carpentered but fairly comfortable bunk, and covered her with a rug. Then he, too, after a brief vigil to assure himself that she would not waken, stretched himself in the second bunk. When next they opened their eyes the sun was shining from a cloudless sky, and Peter was shouting that they just had time to dip their hands and faces in the lake before the "cawfee kem to a bile." They were out in a jiffy, and found themselves in a fairyland. On the one hand, green and blue mountains rose in an almost unscalable rampart; on the other, across two miles of a silvery mirror ordinarily a lake, a wooded landscape fell away in gorgeous tints and ineffable distances. The song of birds trilled in the air, and the fresh, keen scent of the rain-washed pines was pungent in their nostrils. After one delighted glance at this circumambient Paradise, they raced to the water, and, as they ran, Nancy noticed the phenomenally clean-cut reflection of the opposite shore. "Derry," she cried, "just look at that picture! Can you wonder if I hardly know whether I am standing on my head or my heels?" Perhaps, of all the tender memories which Power has hoarded through the years, he is most tenacious of his recollection of Nancy as she was that morning. She seemed some wood-nymph clothed in the garments of civilization, that modern cult which the Greeks, those true poets and clear thinkers, would have scoffed at. Yet, so graceful were her movements, so bewitching her mobile face, so artistic the careless knot into which she had twisted her wealth of nut-brown hair, that not even the Boston tailor of a bygone generation who had equipped her at sight with a fawn-colored coat and skirt could hide the symmetry of her form or impair her winsome beauty.