A Hardy Norseman

"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.