A Hardy Norseman

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A HARDY NORSEMAN

by

EDNA LYALL

Author of “Donovan,” “Knight Errant,” Etc.

[Illustration]

Chicago Donohue, Henneberry & Co. Publishers

[Illustration:

PRINTED AND BOUND BY

DONOHUE & HENNEBERRY

CHICAGO]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. CHAPTER XIV. CHAPTER XV. CHAPTER XVI. CHAPTER XVII. CHAPTER XVIII. CHAPTER XIX. CHAPTER XX. CHAPTER XXI. CHAPTER XXII. CHAPTER XXIII. CHAPTER XXIV. CHAPTER XXV. CHAPTER XXVI. CHAPTER XXVII. CHAPTER XXVIII. CHAPTER XXIX. CHAPTER XXX. CHAPTER XXXI. CHAPTER XXXII. CHAPTER XXXIII. CHAPTER XXXIV. CHAPTER XXXV. CHAPTER XXXVI. CHAPTER XXXVII. CHAPTER XXXVIII. CHAPTER XXXIX. CHAPTER XL.

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A HARDY NORSEMAN.

CHAPTER I.

“You say your things are all ready, Cecil? Then I’ll just go below and do up my Gladstone, and put it in your cabin. We shall be at Bergen before long, they say.”

The speaker was a young Englishman of three-or-four-and-twenty, and the sister addressed by him was still in the first flush of girlhood, having but a few days before celebrated her nineteenth birthday.

“Let me see to your bag, Roy,” she exclaimed. “It is a shame that you should miss this lovely bit of the fjord, and I shall do it in half the time.”

“The conceit of women!” he exclaimed, with a smile in which brotherly love and the spirit of teasing were about equally blended. “No, no, Cis, I’m not going to let you spoil me. I shall be up again in ten minutes. Have you not made any friends here? Is there no one on deck you can talk to?”

“I don’t want to talk,” said Cecil. “Truth to tell, I am longing to get away from all these English people. Very unsociable of me, isn’t it?”

Roy Boniface turned away with a smile, understanding her feeling well enough, and Cecil, with her back to the chattering tourist throng, let her eyes roam over the shining waters of the fjord to the craggy mountains on the further shore, whose ever-varying forms had been delighting her since the early morning.

She herself made a fair picture, though her beauty was not of the order which quickly draws attention. There was nothing very striking in her regular features, fair complexion, and light-brown hair; to a casual observer she would have seemed merely an average English girl, gentle, well-mannered, and nice-looking. It was only to those who took pains to study her that her true nature was revealed; only at times that her quiet gray eyes would flash into sudden beauty with the pleasure of meeting with some rare and unexpected sympathy; only in some special need that the force of her naturally retiring nature made itself felt as a great influence.

Cecil had passed a year of emancipated girlhood, she had for a whole year been her own mistress, had had time and money at her disposal and no special duties to take the place of her school-work. It was the time she had been looking forward to all her life, the blissful time of grown-up freedom, and now that it had come it had proved a disappointing illusion. Whether the fault was in herself or in her circumstances she did not know; but like so many girls of her age she was looking out on life with puzzled eyes, hardly knowing what it was that had gone amiss, yet conscious of a great want, of a great unrest, of a vague dissatisfaction which would not be reasoned down.