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But the actors in this drama have never returned to the commonplace. Or have they? Shall I ever know? I hope I may never know, if Nancy and Olaf have lost the glamour of their dreams.

Well, we found Olaf on deck waiting for us. In a sea-blue tunic, with strong white arms, and the dazzling fairness of his strong neck, he was more than ever like the figurehead on the old ship that I had seen in my childhood. He carried over his arm a cloak of the same sea-blue. It was this cloak which afterward played an important part in the mystery of Nancy’s disappearance.

His quick glance swept Nancy–the ghostly Nancy in gray, with only the blue of her eyes, and that touch of artificial pink in her cheeks to redeem her from somberness. He shook his head with a gesture of impatience.

“I don’t like it,” he said, abruptly. “Why do you deaden your beauty with dull colors?”

Nancy’s eyes challenged him. “If it is deadened, how do you know it is beauty?”

“May I show you?” Again there was that tense excitement which I had noticed in the garden.

“I don’t know what you mean,” yet in that moment the color ran up from her neck to her chin, the fixed pink spots were lost in a rush of lovely flaming blushes.

For with a sudden movement he had snatched off her cap, and had thrown the cloak around her. The transformation was complete. It was as if he had waved a wand. There she stood, the two long, thick braids, which she had worn pinned close under her cap, falling heavily like molten metal to her knees, the blue cloak covering her–heavenly in color, matching her eyes, matching the sea, matching the sky, matching the eyes of Olaf.

I think I must have uttered some sharp exclamation, for Olaf turned to me. “You see,” he said, triumphantly, “I have known it all the time. I knew it the first time that I saw her in the garden.”

Nancy had recovered herself. “But I can’t stalk around the streets in a blue cloak with my hair down.”

He laughed with her. “Oh, no, no. But the color is only a symbol. Modern life has robbed you of vivid things. Even your emotions. You are–afraid–” He caught himself up. “We can talk of that after our swim. I think we shall have a thousand things to talk about.”

Nancy held out her hand for her cap, but he would not give it to her. “Why should you care if your hair gets wet? The wind and the sun will dry it–“

I was amazed when I saw that she was letting him have his way. Never for a moment had Anthony mastered her. For the first time in her life Nancy was dominated by a will that was stronger than her own.

I sat on deck and watched them as they swam like two young sea gods, Nancy’s bronze hair bright under the sun. Olaf’s red-gold crest….

The blue cloak lay across my knee. Nancy had cast it off as she had descended into the launch. I had examined it and had found it of soft, thick wool, with embroidery of a strange and primitive sort in faded colors. Yet the material of the cloak had not faded, or, if it had, there remained that clear azure, like the Virgin’s cloak in old pictures.

I knew now why Olaf had wanted Nancy on board, why he had wanted to swim with her in the sea which was as blue as her eyes and his own. It was to reveal her to himself as the match of the women of the Sagas. I found this description later in one of the old books in the ship’s library:

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