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Handbook of

Cognition

Edited by
Koen Lamberts
and
Robert Goldstone
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page i

HANDBOOK
of
COGNITION
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page ii
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page iii

HANDBOOK
of
COGNITION

Edited by
KOEN LAMBERTS
and ROBERT L. GOLDSTONE
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page iv

Editorial arrangement and introduction © Chapter 9 © Ian Neath and Aimée


Koen Lamberts and Robert L. Goldstone, M. Surprenant, 2005
2005 Chapter 10 © Alan Garnham, 2005
Chapter 1 © Johan Wagemans, Felix A. Chapter 11 © James M. McQueen, 2005
Wichmann and Hans Op de Beeck, Chapter 12 © Alexander Pollatsek and
2005 Keith Rayner, 2005
Chapter 2 © William G. Hayward and Michael Chapter 13 © Nick Chater, Evan Heit and
J. Tarr, 2005 Mike Oaksford, 2005
Chapter 3 © Christopher J. Plack, 2005 Chapter 14 © Craig R. M. McKenzie, 2005
Chapter 4 © Claus Bundesen and Thomas Chapter 15 © Glyn W. Humphreys and
Habekost, 2005 M. Jane Riddoch, 2005
Chapter 5 © Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell and Chapter 16 © Barbara J. Knowlton, 2005
Alan M. Wing, 2005 Chapter 17 © Randi C. Martin and
Chapter 6 © Michael E. Young and Edward A. Denise H. Wu, 2005
Wasserman, 2005 Chapter 18 © Koen Lamberts, 2005
Chapter 7 © John K. Kruschke, 2005 Chapter 19 © Jae I. Myung, Mark A. Pitt and
Chapter 8 © David R. Shanks, 2005 Woojae Kim, 2005

First published 2005

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or


private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may
be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means,
only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in
the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the
terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
Inquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be
sent to the publishers.

SAGE Publications Ltd


1 Oliver’s Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc.


2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd


B-42, Panchsheel Enclave
Post Box 4109
New Delhi 110 017

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data


A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

ISBN 0-7619-7277-3

Library of Congress Control Number available

Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India


Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Ltd., Trowbridge, Wiltshire
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page v

Contents

List of Contributors vii

Acknowledgements xiv
Preface xvi
Part One: PERCEPTION, ATTENTION AND ACTION
1 Visual Perception I: Basic Principles 3
Johan Wagemans, Felix A. Wichmann and Hans Op de Beeck

2 Visual Perception II: High-Level Vision 48


William G. Hayward and Michael J. Tarr

3 Auditory Perception 71
Christopher J. Plack

4 Attention 105
Claus Bundesen and Thomas Habekost

5 Action and Motor Skills: Adaptive Behaviour for Intended Goals 130
Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell and Alan M. Wing

Part Two: LEARNING AND MEMORY

6 Theories of Learning 161


Michael E. Young and Edward A. Wasserman

7 Category Learning 183


John K. Kruschke

8 Implicit Learning 202


David R. Shanks

9 Mechanisms of Memory 221


Ian Neath and Aimée M. Surprenant

Part Three: LANGUAGE

10 Language Comprehension 241


Alan Garnham
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page vi

vi CONTENTS

11 Speech Perception 255


James M. McQueen

12 Reading 276
Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner

Part Four: REASONING AND DECISION MAKING

13 Reasoning 297
Nick Chater, Evan Heit and Mike Oaksford

14 Judgment and Decision Making 321


Craig R. M. McKenzie

Part Five: COGNITIVE NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

15 The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Object Recognition and Action 341


Glyn W. Humphreys and M. Jane Riddoch

16 Cognitive Neuropsychology of Learning and Memory 365


Barbara J. Knowlton

17 The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Language 382


Randi C. Martin and Denise H. Wu

Part Six: MODELLING COGNITION

18 Mathematical Modelling of Cognition 407


Koen Lamberts

19 Model Evaluation, Testing and Selection 422


Jae I. Myung, Mark A. Pitt and Woojae Kim

Index 437
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page vii

List of Contributors

Claus Bundesen is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of


Copenhagen, Director of the Centre for Visual Cognition in Copenhagen, and
Director of the Danish Graduate School of Psychology. He is a member of the
executive committees of the International Association for the Study of Attention
and Performance and the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Editor in
Chief of the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, and member of the editorial
boards of Psychological Review, Psychological Research and Visual Cognition.
His achievements include measurement of effects of visual size in pattern recogni-
tion and apparent movement and development of mathematical models of selec-
tive attention in vision.

Nick Chater is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Institute for


Applied Cognitive Science at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on
building mathematical and computational models of cognitive processes, including
reasoning, decision making, language processing and acquisition, and perception
and categorization. He is particularly interested in ‘rational’ models of cognition.
He is also interested in the application of cognitive science to the private and
public sectors.

Yvonne Delevoye-Turrell is a postdoctorate fellow in the Neuroscience


Laboratory (CNRS) located within the psychiatric unit of the University Hospitals
of Lille, France. After completing a PhD on the predictive adjustments of motor
parameters in collisions (University of Birmingham, UK, September 2000), she
initiated a research project on the systematic investigation of the motor deficits
characterizing the psychiatric illness of schizophrenia. Overall, the topic of her
research centres on the problem of motor prediction: how does the brain adapt
motor actions to the continuously changing dynamics of the environment? Using
schizophrenia as a pathological model, her research now aims at the development
of a cognitive model of the motor systems that incorporates three types of predic-
tive mechanisms: automatic, controlled and voluntary. The fine integration of
these different functions would achieve efficient and optimized adjustments of
motor behaviour.

Alan Garnham is Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of


Sussex, Brighton, UK. He has been a member of faculty at Sussex since 1985.
Before that he spent two years at the University of Reading. His main research
interests are in psycholinguistics, in particular the comprehension of anaphoric
expressions, the role of inference in comprehension, and the role of non-syntactic
information in parsing. His work in psycholinguistics is carried out in the mental
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page viii

viii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

models framework. He is also interested in the application of mental models


theory to reasoning, and in particular in the role of prior beliefs on reasoning.

Thomas Habekost is a PhD student at the Centre for Visual Cognition,


University of Copenhagen. He has also been visiting scholar at the Cognition and
Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge. His research focuses on the neural basis of
visual attention, especially through studies of brain damage. His work includes
mathematical modelling of attentional deficits and development of bootstrap
methods in neuropsychological testing. He has also contributed to the NTVA
model of attentional effects in single cells.

William G. Hayward is an Associate Professor in the Department of


Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received a BA and MA
from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and a PhD from Yale
University. After spending four years as a lecturer at the University of Wollongong
in Australia, he has been at CUHK since 1999. His research focuses on the infor-
mation that subserves object recognition processes, examining such issues as the
debate between view-based and structural description theories, the role of outline
shape information in recognition judgements, and the relationship between
mental rotation and object recognition. In addition, he currently has research projects
investigating visual attention (particularly visual search) and human factors of the
World Wide Web.

Evan Heit is on the faculty of the Psychology Department at the University of


Warwick. Since obtaining his PhD from Stanford University in 1990, he has
worked in three related areas of cognitive psychology: categorization, inductive
reasoning and recognition memory. He is especially interested in issues that are
relevant to two or more of these areas, such as the effects of prior knowledge, and
psychological accounts that can be applied to two or more of these, such as
Bayesian models.

Glyn W. Humphreys is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of


Birmingham. He has long-standing interests in high-level visual cognition, using
converging data from experimental psychology, neuropsychology, computational
modelling and functional brain imaging. He is the editor of the journal Visual
Cognition and has received the British Psychological Society’s Spearman and
President Awards for research, along with the Cognitive Psychology Prize.

Woojae Kim is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology at the Ohio


State University, Columbus, Ohio. His research interests include connectionist
modelling of language learning, model selection methods, and Bayesian statistics.

Barbara J. Knowlton is an Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA. Her


research focuses on the neural substrates of memory and executive function. One of
her main interests is the study of multiple forms of implicit learning, both in terms
of psychological properties and supporting brain structures. Another interest is the
role of the medial temporal lobe in the formation and retrieval of episodic memory.
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page ix

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS ix

John K. Kruschke is Professor of Psychology at Indiana University,


Bloomington, where he has been employed since earning his PhD from the
University of California at Berkeley in 1990. He studies how people allocate
attention during simple learning tasks, and he creates mathematical models and
computer simulations to rigorously test theories of attention in learning. He was a
recipient of the Troland Research Award from the United States National Academy
of Sciences in 2002, and has received teaching excellence awards from Indiana
University.

Koen Lamberts is Professor of Psychology at the University of Warwick.


Following his PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 1992, he was a post-
doctoral research associate at the University of Chicago, and then moved to a
lectureship at the University of Birmingham. He moved to Warwick in 1998, where
he has been head of the Psychology Department since 2000. He has won the British
Psychological Society’s Cognitive Award (1996) and the Experimental Psychology
Society Prize (1997). His research interests include mathematical models of cogni-
tive processes in perceptual categorization and recognition memory.

Randi C. Martin is the Elma Schneider Professor of Psychology and


Department Chair at Rice University where she has been a faculty member since
1982. Her research interests are in cognition and cognitive neuroscience, with a
particular interest in language processing. Much of her research has been con-
cerned with the nature of verbal short-term memory and its role in the compre-
hension, production and learning of language. She has also carried out studies on
reading and spelling, semantic representation and executive function. In addition
to behavioural studies with normal and brain-damaged populations, her recent
work has included functional neuroimaging studies of language processing.

Craig R. M. McKenzie is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University


of California, San Diego, where he has been since receiving his PhD from the
University of Chicago in 1994. His research interests include inference, uncer-
tainty and choice. Most of his recent research centres on how higher-order cogni-
tion is influenced by the predictable structure of our natural environment.

James M. McQueen is a member of the scientific staff at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he has been since 1993.
Prior to that appointment, he held a postdoctoral position at the MRC Applied
Psychology Unit, Cambridge, UK. He studies spoken language processing, espe-
cially spoken word recognition. His research focuses on the way in which the
information in the speech signal makes contact with stored lexical knowledge as
we process spoken language, on how we perceive speech sounds, and on how we
segment the acoustically continuous speech signal into discrete words during
speech comprehension.

Jae I. Myung is Professor of Psychology at the Ohio State University, Columbus,


Ohio. After completing his graduate study at Purdue University in 1990 and
one-year postdoctoral work at the University of Virginia, he moved to Ohio State
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page x

x LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

in 1991 and has been there since. The focus of his recent research efforts has been
on the development of statistical methods for testing and selecting among mathe-
matical models of cognition, especially Bayesian inference methods and minimum
description length.

Ian Neath is Professor of Psychology at Purdue University in West Lafayette,


Indiana, where he has been on the faculty since receiving his PhD in 1991. His
research interests focus on human memory as a discrimination problem, with
remembering and forgetting reflecting the outcome of the discrimination decision.
He is especially interested in distinctiveness models of memory as well as models
of immediate memory. Both types of models account for memory performance
without the concept of decay and both emphasize the functional importance of the
type of processing.

Mike Oaksford is Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cardiff University,


Wales, UK. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Cognitive
Science, University of Edinburgh, and was then lecturer at the University of Wales,
Bangor, and senior lecturer at the University of Warwick, before moving to Cardiff
University in 1996. His research interests are in the area of human reasoning and
decision making. In particular, with his colleague Nick Chater, he has been develop-
ing a Bayesian probabilistic approach to deductive reasoning tasks. According to this
approach, reasoning ‘biases’ are the result of applying the wrong normative model
and failing to take account of people’s normal environment. He also studies the way
the emotions affect and interact with reasoning and decision making processes.

Hans Op de Beeck is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Brain and


Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He obtained his
PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in April 2003. His research focuses on
the cognitive neuroscience of object recognition and categorization. Research
topics include the effect of visual learning on object representations and the relation
between object similarity and categorization. His work involves human and
monkey subjects, and a range of methodologies (psychophysics, single-cell recordings
and fMRI).

Mark A. Pitt is Professor of Psychology at Ohio State University. He began his


academic career at OSU studying the age-old question of how memory influences
perception. In particular, he sought to understand how knowledge of one’s
language (e.g. its words and linguistic structure) affects its perception. In 1995 this
work led him to become interested in how to compare computational models of
these and other psychological processes. Done in collaboration with his buddy
down the hall, In Jae Myung, the early work has a Bayesian flavour and focused
on quantifying the complexity of statistical models. Subsequent research probes
the concept of complexity more deeply to obtain a richer understanding of model
behaviour, the goal being to clarify the relationship between a model, the theory
from which it was derived, and the experimental data being modelled. He cannot
seem to make up his mind which topics he likes more, maths modelling or psycho-
linguistics, so he continues to study both.
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page xi

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xi

Christopher J. Plack is Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex,


Colchester, UK. He studied at the University of Cambridge before taking post-
doctoral positions at the University of Minnesota in 1990 and at the University of
Sussex in 1992. In 1994 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research
Fellowship. He has been at Essex since 1998. In his research he uses psycho-
physical techniques to measure basic auditory processes, particularly those under-
lying the sensations of pitch and loudness, and the integration of information over
time. He has also helped develop techniques for measuring the response of the
basilar membrane in the human cochlea, the structure responsible for separating
out the different frequency components of sounds.

Alexander Pollatsek is Professor of Psychology at the University of


Massachusetts. His research interests are varied, including mathematical and
statistical reasoning, visual perception and cognition, and applied areas such as dri-
ving safety. However, his major research interest is in language, and specifically,
the process of reading. Most of this work is in collaboration with Keith Rayner and
examines the process of reading using the pattern of eye movements while people
read text, and many studies also involve making changes in the text when the
reader’s eyes are moving. This research has established that the area of text from
which readers extract information is quite small, and also that phonological pro-
cessing is routinely used – even by skilled readers. His recent research has
explored the role of morphemes in word identification in English, Finnish and
Hebrew.

Keith Rayner is Distinguished University Professor in the Psychology


Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was on the faculty at
the University of Rochester from 1973 to 1978 prior to moving to the University
of Massachusetts. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Oxford
(1984–1985), an Invited Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
(1987–1988) and Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University of Durham
(2001–2002). His research interests are primarily in the area of skilled reading and
language processing. With Alexander Pollatsek and other colleagues, he has used
the eye-movement methodology to study various issues related to moment-to-
moment processing. He was editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition from 1990 to 1995, and is currently editor of
Psychological Review.

M. Jane Riddoch is a Professor in Cognitive Neuropsychology at the University


of Birmingham. She has been a member of the faculty in the School of
Psychology, University of Birmingham, since 1989. Her research interests focus
on visual attention (grouping processes in perceptual organization and their inter-
action with visual attention), space processing (investigation of the neural mecha-
nisms involved in space perception and cognition), mental imagery (investigations
into the equivalence of mental imagery and visual perception), shape and object
recognition (investigations into the nature of processing underlying object recog-
nition) and vision and action (investigations into how visual information is used
in the selection of actions to objects).
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xii LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

David R. Shanks is Professor of Experimental Psychology and Head of the


Psychology Department at University College London, and is also Scientific
Director of the ESRC Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, UCL.
His research interests cover human learning, memory and decision making. He is
particularly interested in the use of broad computational models that deploy a small
set of fundamental principles such as error correction to elucidate a range of mental
processes. An example is the use of connectionist models to simulate category
learning, amnesia, probability judgement and choice behaviour. He is the author of
The Psychology of Associative Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Aimée M. Surprenant is an Associate Professor in the Department of


Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, in West Lafayette, Indiana. She
received a BA in psychology from New York University in 1988 and a PhD in
cognitive psychology from Yale University in 1992. She received a National
Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health for postdoctoral
work at Indiana University in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences.
Her research focuses on the effects of noise on the perception of and memory for
auditorily presented information.

Michael J. Tarr is the Fox Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences in


the Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences at Brown University
(Providence, Rhode Island). Prior to that he was a professor at Yale University.
His research focuses on mid- and high-level visual processing in the primate brain.
The basic question he would like to answer is ‘How does vision make sense of the
world around us?’ Current interests aimed at answering this question include the
types of visual inferences made about lighting in the environment, the role of
surface properties in object recognition, and the nature of processing in domains
of perceptual expertise (including face recognition). When not pondering such
problems, he is often riding his bike or playing in his wood shop.

Johan Wagemans is Professor in Psychology at the University of Leuven,


Belgium. He has been visiting professor at the University of Nijmegen, The
Netherlands, and at the University of Virginia. His research interests are all in
visual perception, mainly in perceptual organization (e.g. grouping, symmetry,
subjective contours), shape perception (e.g. picture identification, categorization,
3-D objects) and depth perception (e.g. texture, motion, stereo). He has interdisci-
plinary research projects with neuroscientists and computer vision engineers. He
has published about 70 papers in international research journals and is currently
editor of Acta Psychologica.

Edward A. Wasserman is the Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology at


the University of Iowa. He received his PhD from Indiana University in 1972 and
was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Sussex. His research programme
includes the comparative analysis of learning, memory and cognition, with special
interests in causation, conceptualization and visual perception. His most recent
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page xiii

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS xiii

work has studied the recognition of objects by pigeons, and the discrimination of
variability by pigeons, baboons and humans.

Felix A. Wichmann is a research scientist and head of the Computational Vision


Laboratory in the Empirical Inference Department of the Max Planck Institute for
Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. He did his undergraduate studies
and received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK, and was a Junior
Research Fellow at Magdalen College. Prior to moving to the MPI in Tübingen he
was a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the University of Leuven, Belgium. His main
interests are quantitative models of spatial vision and the implications of natural
image statistics for models of human vision. Recently, he has begun to explore the
application of machine learning methods to problems of human categorization.

Alan M. Wing is Professor of Human Movement in the School of Psychology


at the University of Birmingham. He heads the Sensory Motor Neuroscience
group in the interdisciplinary Brain Behavioural Science Centre. Previously he
was Assistant Director at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge. He
has published widely on motor psychophysics of normal and impaired control of
movement and balance, including three edited volumes. His current research
includes reactive and predictive control of movement of the upper and lower
limbs, active touch, rhythm and timing.

Denise H. Wu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Cognitive


Neuroscience, University of Pennsylvania. She studied in the Psychology Depart-
ment at Rice University and received her PhD in January 2003. Her research
mainly concentrates on long-term linguistic representation, verbal short-term
memory and the interaction between the two. She has studied reading mechanisms
with brain-damaged patients. She has also employed the functional neuroimaging
technique to examine the neural substrates of semantic and phonological short-
term memory. Her current research focuses on processing of action and verbs.

Michael E. Young is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Director of the


Brain and Cognitive Sciences programme at Southern Illinois University at
Carbondale. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota and was a
postdoctoral associate at the University of Iowa. His research interests include the
perception of stimulus variability and the psychology of causal learning and
perception. His most recent work incorporates models of visual search into models
of variability discrimination and explores the impact of temporal predictability on
causal judgements.
Lambert-prelims.qxd 9/14/2004 2:19 PM Page xiv

Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright
material:

CHAPTER 1

Figure 1.1

Wandell, 1995, Foundations of Vision, Fig 7.16, p. 222. Sunderland MA: Sinauer

Figure 1.2

Adelson, E. H., & Bergen, J. R. (1991). ‘The plenoptic function and the elements
of early vision’, Fig 1.8, in, Landy, M. S., & Movshon A. (Eds.), Computational
Models of Visual Processing. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Figure 1.3

Adelson, E. H., & Bergen, J. R. (1991). ‘The plenoptic function and the elements
of early vision’, Fig 1.14, in, Landy, M. S., & Movshon A. (Eds.), Computational
Models of Visual Processing. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Figure 1.4

Adelson, E. H., & Bergen, J. R. (1991). ‘The plenoptic function and the elements
of early vision’, Fig 1.15, in, Landy, M. S., & Movshon A. (Eds.), Computational
Models of Visual Processing. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

CHAPTER 2

Figure 2.1

Farah, Martha (1990), Visual Agnosia: Disorders of Object Recognition, Figs 16 &
17, p. 61. Cambridge MA: MIT Press

Figure 2.3

Reprinted from Cognitive Psychology, Vol 21(2). Tarr, M. J., & Pinker ‘Mental
Rotation and Orientation-Depdence in Shape’, Fig 1, p. 243, and Fig 6, p. 255,
1989, with permission from Elsevier.
Another Random Document on
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justified in laughing, suh, at my foolish fancy—that went wrong
mainly because the Yankee ca'pentah whom I employed to realize it
was a hopelessly damned fool. But it was a creditable sentiment,
suh, which led me to desiah to reproduce heah in godfo'saken
Minnesotah my ancestral home in the grand old State of South
Cahrolina—the house that my grandfatheh built theah and named
Eutaw Castle, as I have named its pore successeh, because of the
honorable paht he bo' in the battle of Eutaw Springs. The result, I
admit, is a thing to laugh at, suh—but not the ideah. No, suh, not
the ideah! But come in, suh, come in! The exterioh of Eutaw Castle
may be a failuah; but within it, suh, yo' will find in this cold No'th'en
region the genuine wahm hospitality of a true Southe'n home!"
Maltham perceived that the only apology which he could offer for
laughing at this absurd house—the absurdity of which became rather
pathetic, he thought, in view of its genesis—was to accept its
owner's invitation to enter it. Acting on this conclusion, he turned
into the enclosure—the gate, hanging loosely on a single hinge, was
standing open—and mounted the veranda steps.
As he reached the top step his host advanced and shook hands with
him warmly. "Yo'ah vehy welcome, suh," he said; and added, after
putting his hand to a pocket in search of something that evidently
was not there: "Ah, I find that I have not my cahd-case about me.
Yo' must pehmit me to introduce myself: Majoh Calhoun Ashley, of
the Confedehrate sehvice, suh—and vehy much at youahs."
Maltham started a little as he heard this name, and the small shock
so far threw him off his balance that as he handed his card to the
Major he said: "Then it was your name that I saw just now in—" And
stopped short, inwardly cursing himself for his awkwardness.
"That yo' saw in the little graveyahd, on the tomb of my eveh-
beloved wife, suh," the Major replied—with a quaver in his voice
which compelled Maltham mentally to reverse his recent
generalizations. The Major was silent for a moment, and then
continued: "Heh grave is not yet mahked fitly, suh, as no doubt yo'
obsehved. Cihcumstances oveh which I have had no control have
prevented me from erecting as yet a suitable monument oveh heh
sacred remains. She was my queen, suh"—his voice broke again
—"and of a line of queens: a descendant, suh, from a collateral
branch of the ancient royal house of Sweden. I am hoping, I am
hoping, suh, that I shall be able soon to erect oveh heh last resting-
place a monument wo'thy of heh noble lineage and of hehself. I am
hoping, suh, to do that vehy soon."
The Major again was silent for a moment; and then, pulling himself
together, he looked at Maltham's card—holding it a long way off
from his eyes. "Youah name is familiar to me, suh," he said, "though
fo' the moment I do not place it, and I am most happy to make
youah acquaintance. But come in, suh, come in. I am fo'getting
myself—keeping you standing this way outside of my own doah."
He took Maltham cordially by the arm and led him through the
doorway into a wide bare hall; and thence into a big room on the
right, that was very scantily furnished but that was made cheerful by
a rousing drift-wood fire. Over the high mantel-piece was hung an
officer's sword with its belt. On the buckle of the belt were the
letters C. S. A. Excepting this rather pregnant bit of decoration, the
whitewashed walls were bare.
The Major bustled with hospitality—pulling the bigger and more
comfortable of two arm-chairs to the fire and seating Maltham in it,
and then bringing out glasses and a bottle from a queer structure of
unpainted white pine that stood at one end of the room and had the
look of a sideboard gone wrong.
"At the moment, suh," he said apologetically, "my cellah is badly
fuhnished and I am unable to offeh yo' wine. But if yo' have an
appreciative taste fo' Bourbon," he went on with more assurance, "I
am satisfied that yo' will find the ahticle in this bottle as sound as
any that the noble State of Kentucky eveh has produced. Will yo'
oblige me, suh, by saying when!"
Not knowing about the previous wet night, and its still lingering
consequences, the promptness with which Maltham said "when"
seemed to disconcert the Major a little—but not sufficiently to deter
him from filling his own glass with a handsome liberality. Holding it
at a level with his lips, he turned toward his guest with the obvious
intention of drinking a toast.
"May I have a little water, please?" put in Maltham.
"I beg youah pahdon, suh. I humbly beg youah pahdon," the Major
answered. "I am not accustomed to dilute my own liquoh, and I
most thoughtlessly assumed that yo' would not desiah to dilute
youahs. I trust that yo' will excuse my seeming rudeness, suh. Yo'
shall have at once the bevehrage which yo' desiah."
While still apologizing, the Major placed his glass on the table and
went to the door. Opening it he called: "Ulrica, my child, bring a
pitcheh of fresh wateh right away."
Again Maltham gave a little start—as he had done when the Major
had introduced himself. In a vague sub-conscious way he felt that
there was something uncanny in thus finding living owners of names
which he had seen, within that very hour, scarcely legible above an
uncared-for grave. But the Major, talking on volubly, did not give him
much opportunity for these psychological reflections; and presently
there was the sound of footsteps in the hall outside, and then the
door opened and the owner of the grave-name appeared.
IV

Because of the odd channel in which his thoughts were running,


Maltham had the still odder fancy for an instant that the young girl
who entered the room was the dead Ulrica of whom the Major had
spoken—"a queen, and of a line of queens." And even when this
thought had passed—so quickly that it was gone before he had risen
to his feet to greet her—the impression of her queenliness remained.
For this living woman bearing a dead name might have been
Aslauga herself: so tall and stately was she, and so fair with that
cold beauty of the North of which the soul is fire. Instinctively he felt
the fire, and knew that it still slumbered—and knew, too, that in the
fulness of time, being awakened, it would glow with a consuming
splendour in her dark eyes.
All this went in a flash through his mind before the Major said:
"Pehmit me, Mr. Maltham, to present yo' to my daughteh, Miss Ulrica
Ashley." And added: "Mr. Maltham was passing, Ulrica, and did me
the honeh to accept my invitation to come in."
She put down the pitcher of water and gave Maltham her hand. "It
was very kind of you, sir," she said gravely. "We do not have many
visitors, and my father gets lonely with only me. It was very kind of
you, sir, indeed." She spoke with a certain precision, and with a very
slight accent—so slight that Maltham did not immediately notice it.
What he did notice, with her first words, was the curiously thrilling
quality of her low-pitched and very rich voice.
"And don't you get lonely too?" he asked.
"Why no," she answered with a little air of surprise. And speaking
slowly, as though she were working the matter out in her mind, she
added: "With me it is different, you see. I was born here on the
Point and I love it. And then I have the house to look after. And I
have my boat. And I can talk with the neighbours—though I do not
often care to. Father cannot talk with them, because he does not
know Swedish as I do. When he wants company he has to go all the
way up to town. You see, it is not the same with us at all." And then,
as though she had explained the matter sufficiently, she turned to
the Major and asked: "Do you want anything more, father?"
"Nothing mo', my child—except that an extra place is to be set at
table. Mr. Maltham will dine with us, of co'se."
At this Maltham protested a little; but presently yielded to Ulrica's,
"You will be doing a real kindness to father if you will stay, Mr.
Maltham," backed by the Major's peremptory: "Yo' ah my prisoneh,
suh, and in Eutaw Castle we don't permit ouah prisonehs to stahve!"
The matter being thus settled, Ulrica made a little formal bow and
left the room.
"The wateh is at youah sehvice, suh," said the Major as the door
closed behind her. "I beg that yo' will dilute youah liquoh to youah
liking. Heah's to youah very good health, suh—and to ouah betteh
acquaintance." He drank his whiskey appreciatively, and as he set
down his empty glass continued: "May I ask, suh, if yo' ah living in
Duluth, oh mehly passing through? I ventuah to ask because a
resident of this town sca'cely would be likely to come down on the
Point at this time of yeah."
"I began to be a resident only day before yesterday," Maltham
answered. "I've come to take charge here of our steamers—the
Sunrise Line."
"The Sunrise Line!" repeated the Major in a very eager tone. "The
biggest transpo'tation line on the lakes. The line of which that great
capitalist Mr. John L. Maltham is president. And to think, suh, that I
did not recognize youah name!"
"John L. Maltham is my father," the young man said.
"Why, of co'se, of co'se! I might have had the sense to know that as
soon as I looked at youah cahd. This is a most fo'tunate meeting,
Mr. Maltham—most fo'tunate for both of us. I shall not on this
occasion, when yo' ah my guest, enteh into a discussion of business
mattehs. But at an eahly day I shall have the honeh to lay befo' yo'
convincing reasons why youah tehminal docks should be established
heah on the Point—which a beneficent Providence cleahly intended
to be the shipping centeh of this metropolis—and prefehrably, suh,
as the meahest glance at a chaht of the bay will demonstrate, heah
on my land. Yo' will have the first choice of the wha'ves which I have
projected; and I may even say, suh, that any altehrations which will
affo'd mo' convenient accommodations to youah vessels still ah
possible. Yes, suh, the matteh has not gone so fah but that any
reasonable changes which yo' may desiah may yet be made."
Remembering the sedgy swamps beside which he had passed that
morning, Maltham was satisfied that the Major's concluding
statement was well within the bounds of truth. But he was not
prepared to meet off-hand so radical a proposition, and while he was
fumbling in his mind for some sort of non-committal answer the
Major went on again.
"It is not fo' myself, suh," he said, "that I desiah to realize this
magnificent undehtaking. Living heah costs little, and what I get
from renting my land to camping pahties and fo' picnics gives me all
I need. And I'm an old man, anyway, and whetheh I die rich oh pore
don't matteh. It's fo' my daughteh's sake that I seek wealth, suh,
not fo' my own. That deah child of mine is heh sainted motheh oveh
again, Mr. Maltham—except that heh motheh's eyes weh blue. That
is the only diffehrence. And beside heh looks she has identically the
same sweet natuah, suh—the same exquisite goodness and beauty
of haht. When my great loss came to me," the Major's voice broke
badly, "it was my love fo' that deah child kept me alive. It breaks my
haht, suh, to think of dying and leaving heh heah alone and pore."
Maltham had got to his bearings by this time and was able to frame
a reasonably diplomatic reply. "Well, perhaps we'd better not go into
the matter to-day," he said. "You see, our line has traffic agreements
with the N. P. and the Northwestern that must hold for the present,
anyway. And then I've only just taken charge, you know, and I must
look around a little before I do anything at all. But I might write to
my father to come up here when he can, and then he and you could
have a talk."
The Major's look of eager cheerfulness faded at the beginning of this
cooling rejoinder, but he brightened again at its end. "A talk with
youah fatheh, suh," he answered, "would suit me down to the
ground-flo'. An oppo'tunity to discuss this great matteh info'mally
with a great capitalist has been what I've most desiahed fo' yeahs.
But I beg youah pahdon, suh. I am fo'getting the sacred duties of
hospitality. Pehmit me to fill youah glass."
It seemed to pain him that his guest refused this invitation; but,
finding him obdurate, he kept the sacred duties of hospitality in
working order by exercising them freely upon himself. "Heah's to the
glorious futuah of Minnesotah Point, suh!" he said as he raised his
glass—and it was obvious that he would be off again upon the
exploitation of his hopelessly impossible project as soon as he put it
down. Greatly to Maltham's relief, the door opened at that juncture
and Ulrica entered to call them to dinner; and he was still more
relieved, when they were seated at table, by finding that his host
dropped business matters and left the glorious future of Minnesota
Point hanging in the air.
At his own table, indeed, the Major was quite at his best. He told
good stories of his army life, and of his adventurous wanderings
which ended when he struck Duluth just at the beginning of its first
"boom"; and very entertaining was what he had to tell of that
metropolis in its embryotic days.
But good though the Major's stories were, Maltham found still more
interesting the Major's daughter—who spoke but little, and who
seemed to be quite lost at times in her own thoughts. As he sat
slightly turned toward her father he could feel her eyes fixed upon
him; and more than once, facing about suddenly, he met her look
full. When this happened she was not disconcerted, nor did she
immediately look away from him—and he found himself thrilled
curiously by her deeply intent gaze. Yet the very frankness of it gave
it a quality that was not precisely flattering. He had the feeling that
she was studying him in much the same spirit that she would have
studied some strange creature that she might have come across in
her walks in the woods. When he tried to bring her into the talk he
did not succeed; but this was mainly because the Major invariably
cut in before he could get beyond a direct question and a direct
reply. Only once—when her father made some reference to her love
for sailing—was her reserve, which was not shyness, a little broken;
and the few words that she spoke before the Major broke in again
were spoken so very eagerly that Maltham resolved to bring her
back to that subject when he could get the chance. Knowing
something of the ways of women, he knew that to set her to talking
about anything in which she was profoundly interested would lower
her guard at all points—and so would enable him to come in touch
with her thoughts. He wanted to get at her thoughts. He was sure
that they were not of a commonplace kind.
V

When the dinner was ended he made a stroke for the chance that he
wanted. "Will you show me your boat?" he asked. "I'm a bit of a
sailor myself, and I should like to see her very much indeed."
"Oh, would you? I am so glad!" she answered eagerly. And then
added more quietly: "It is a real pleasure to show you the Nixie. I
am very fond of her and very proud of her. Father gave her to me
three years ago—after he sold a lot over in West Superior. And it was
very good of him, because he does not like sailing at all. Will you
come now? It is only a step down to the wharf."
The Major declared that he must have his after-dinner pipe in
comfort, and they went off without him—going out by a side door
and across a half-acre of kitchen-garden, still in winter disorder, to
the wharf on the bay-side where the Nixie was moored. She was a
half-decked twenty-foot cat-boat, clean in her lines and with the look
of being able to hold her own pretty well in a blow.
"Is she not beautiful?" Ulrica asked with great pride. And presently,
when Maltham came to a pause in his praises, she added
hesitatingly: "Would you—would you care to come out in her for a
little while?"
"Indeed I would!" he answered instantly and earnestly.
"Oh, thank you, thank you!" Ulrica exclaimed. "I do want you to see
how wonderfully she sails!"
The boat was moored with her stern close to the wharf and with her
bow made fast to an outstanding stake. When they had boarded her
Ulrica cast off the stern mooring, ran the boat out to the stake and
made fast with a short hitch, and then—as the boat swung around
slowly in the slack air under the land—set about hoisting the sail.
She would not permit Maltham to help her. He sat aft, steadying the
tiller, watching with delight her vigorous dexterity and her display of
absolute strength. When she had sheeted home and made fast she
cast off the bow mooring, and then stepped aft quickly and took the
tiller from his hand. For a few moments they drifted slowly. Then the
breeze, coming over the tree-tops, caught them and she leaned
forward and dropped the centreboard and brought the boat on the
wind. It was a leading wind, directly off the lake, that enabled them
to make a single leg of it across the bay. As the boat heeled over
Maltham shifted his seat to the weather side. This brought him a
little in front of Ulrica, and below her as she stood to steer. From
under the bows came a soft hissing and bubbling as the boat slid
rapidly along.
"Is she not wonderful?" Ulrica asked with a glowing enthusiasm.
"Just see how we are dropping that big sloop over yonder—and the
Nixie not half her size! But the Nixie is well bred, you see, and the
sloop is not. She is as heavy all over as the Nixie is clean and fine.
Father says that breeding is everything—in boats and in horses and
in men. He says that a gentleman is the finest thing that God ever
created. It was because the Southerners all were gentlemen that
they whipped the Yankees, you know."
"But they didn't—the Yankees whipped them."
"Only in the last few battles, father says—and those did not count,
so far as the principle is concerned," Ulrica answered conclusively.
Maltham did not see his way to replying to this presentation of the
matter and was silent. Presently she went on, with a slight air of
apology: "I hope you did not mind my looking at you so much while
we were at dinner, Mr. Maltham. You see, except father, you are the
only gentleman I ever have had a chance to look at close, that way,
in my whole life. Father will not have much to do with the people
living up in town. Most of them are Yankees, and he does not like
them. None of them ever come to see us. The only people I ever
talk with are our neighbours; and they are just common people, you
know—though some of them are as good as they can be. And as
father always is talking about what a gentleman ought to be or
ought not to be it is very interesting really to meet one. That was
the reason why I stared at you so. I hope you did not mind."
"I'm glad I interested you, even if it was only as a specimen of a
class," Maltham answered. "I hope that you found me a good
specimen." Her simplicity was so refreshing that he sought by a
leading question to induce a farther exhibition of it. "What is your
ideal of a gentleman?" he asked.
"Oh, just the ordinary one," she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. "A
gentleman must be absolutely brave, and must kill any man who
insults him—or, at least, must hurt him badly. He must be absolutely
honest—though he is not bound, of course, to tell all that he knows
when he is selling a horse. He must be absolutely true to the woman
he loves, and must never deceive her in any way. He must not
refuse to drink with another gentleman unless he is willing to fight
him. He must protect women and children. He must always be
courteous—though he may be excused for a little rudeness when he
has been drinking and so is not quite himself. He must be hospitable
—ready to share his last crust with anybody, and his last drink with
anybody of his class. And he must know how to ride and shoot and
play the principal games of cards. Those are the main things. You
are all that, are you not?"
She looked straight at him as she asked this question, speaking still
in the same entirely matter-of-fact tone. But Maltham did not look
straight back at her as he answered it. The creed that she set forth
had queer articles in it, but its essentials were searching—so
searching that his look was directed rather indefinitely toward the
horizon as he replied, a little weakly perhaps: "Why, of course."
She seemed to be content with this not wholly conclusive answer;
but as he was not content with it himself, and rather dreaded a
cross-examination, he somewhat suddenly shifted the talk to a
subject that he was sure would engross her thoughts. "How
splendidly the Nixie goes!" he said. "She is a racer, and no mistake!"
"Indeed she is!" Ulrica exclaimed, with the fervour upon which he
had counted. "She is the very fastest boat on the bay. And then she
is so weatherly! Why, I can sail her into the very eye of the wind!"
"Yes, she has the look of being weatherly. But she wouldn't be if you
didn't manage her so well. Who taught you how to sail?"
"It was old Gustav Bergmann—one of the fishermen here on the
Point, you know. And he said," she went on with a little touch of
pride, "that he never could have made such a good sailor of me if I
had not had it in my blood—because I am a Swede."
"But you are an American."
Ulrica did not answer him immediately, and when she did speak it
was with the same curiously slow thoughtfulness that he had
observed when she was explaining the difference between her
father's life and her own life in the solitude of Minnesota Point.
"I do not think I am," she said. "I do not know many American
women, but I am not like any American woman I know. You see, I
am very like my mother. Father says so, and I feel it—I cannot tell
you just how I feel it, but I do. For one thing, I am more than half a
savage, father says—like some of the wild Indians he has known. He
is in fun, of course, when he says that; but he really is right, I am
sure. Did you ever want to kill anybody, Mr. Maltham?"
"No," said Maltham with a laugh, "I never did. Did you?"
Ulrica remained grave. "Yes," she answered, "and I almost did it,
too. You see, it was this way: A man, one of the campers down on
the Point, was rude to me. He was drunk, I think. But I did not think
about his being drunk, and that I ought to make allowances for him.
Somehow, I had not time to think. Everything got red suddenly—and
before I knew what I was doing I had out my knife. The man gave a
scream—not a cry, but a real scream: he must have been a great
coward, I suppose—and jumped away just as I struck at him. I cut
his arm a little, I think. But I am not sure, for he ran away as hard
as he could run. I was very sorry that I had not killed him. I am very
sorry still whenever I think about it. Now that was not like an
American woman. At least, I do not know any American woman who
would try to kill a man that way because she really could not help
trying to. Do you?"
"No," Maltham answered, drawing a quick breath that came close to
being a gasp. Ulrica's entire placidity, and her argumentative
manner, had made her story rather coldly thrilling—and it was quite
thrilling enough without those adjuncts, he thought.
She seemed pleased that his answer confirmed her own opinion.
"Yes, I think I am right about myself," she went on. "I am sure that
it is my Swedish blood that makes me like that. We do not often get
angry, you know, we Swedes: but when we do, our anger is rage.
We do not think nor reason. Suddenly we see red, as I did that day,
and we want to strike to kill. It is queer, is it not, that we should be
made like that?"
Maltham certainly was discovering the strange thoughts that he had
set himself to search for. They rather set his nerves on edge. As she
uttered her calm reflection upon the oddity of the Swedish
temperament he shivered a little.
"I am afraid that you are cold," she said anxiously. "Shall we go
about? Father will not like it if I make you uncomfortable."
"I am not at all cold," he answered. "And the sailing is delightful.
Don't let us go about yet."
"Well, if you are quite sure that you are not cold, we will not. I do
want to take you down to the inlet and show you what a glorious
sea is running on the lake to-day. It is only half a mile more."
They sailed on for a little while in silence. The swift send of the boat
through the water seemed so to fill Ulrica with delight that she did
not care to speak—nor did Maltham, who was busied with his own
confused thoughts. Suddenly some new and startling concepts of
manhood and of womanhood had been thrust into his mind. They
puzzled him, and he was not at all sure that he liked them. But he
was absolutely sure that this curious and very beautiful woman who
had uttered them interested him more profoundly than any woman
whom ever he had known. That fact also bothered him, and he tried
to blink it. That he could not blink it was one reason why his
thoughts were confused. Presently, being accustomed to slide along
the lines of least resistance, he gave up trying. "After all," was his
conclusion, so far as he came to a conclusion, "it is only for a day."
VI

As they neared the inlet the water roughened a little and the wind
grew stronger. Ulrica eased off the sheet, and steadied it with a turn
around the pin. In a few minutes more they had opened the inlet
fairly, and beyond it could see the lake—stretching away indefinitely
until its cold grey surface was lost against the cold grey sky. A very
heavy sea was running. In every direction was the gleam of white-
caps. On the beaches to the left and right of them a high surf was
booming in. They ran on, close-hauled, until they were nearly
through the inlet and were come into a bubble of water that set the
boat to dancing like a cork. Now and then, as she fell off, a wave
would take her with a thump and cover them with a cloud of spray.
The helm was pulling hard, but Ulrica managed it as easily and as
knowingly as she had managed the setting of the sail—standing with
her feet well apart, firmly braced, her tall figure yielding to the
boat's motion with a superb grace. Suddenly a gust of wind carried
away her hat, and in another moment the great mass of her golden
hair was blowing out behind her in the strong eddy from the sail.
Her face was radiant. Every drop of her Norse blood was tingling in
her veins. Aslauga herself never was more gloriously beautiful—and
never more joyously drove her boat onward through a stormy sea.
But Maltham did not perceive her beauty, nor did he in the least
share her glowing enthusiasm. He had passed beyond mere
nervousness and was beginning to be frightened. It seemed to him
that she let the boat fall off purposely—as though to give the waves
a chance to buffet it, and then to show her command over them by
bringing it up again sharply into the wind; and he was certain that if
they carried on for another five minutes, and so got outside the
inlet, they would be swamped.
"Don't you think that we had better go about?" he asked. It did not
please him to find that he had not complete control over his voice.
"But it is so glorious," she answered. "Shall we not keep on just a
little way?"
"No!" he said sharply. "We must go about at once. We are in great
danger as it is." He felt that he had turned pale. In spite of his
strong effort to steady it, his voice shook badly and also was a little
shrill.
"Oh, of course," she replied, with a queer glance at him that he did
not at all fancy; "if you feel that way about it we will." The radiance
died away from her face as she spoke, and with it went her
intoxication of delight. And then her expression grew anxious as she
looked about her, and in an anxious tone she added: "Indeed you
are quite right, Mr. Maltham. We really are in a bad place here. I
ought never to have come out so far. We must try to get back at
once. But it will not be easy. I am not sure that the Nixie will stand
it. I am sure, though, that she will do her best—and I will try to
wear her as soon as I see a chance."
She luffed a little, that she might get more sea-room to leeward, and
scanned the oncoming waves closely but without a sign of fear.
"Now I think I can do it," she said presently, and put up the helm.
It was a ticklish move, for they were at the very mouth of the inlet,
but the Nixie paid off steadily until she came full into the trough of
the sea. There she wallowed for a bad ten seconds. A wave broke
over the coaming of the cockpit and set it all aflow. Maltham went
still whiter, and began to take off his coat. It was with the greatest
difficulty that he kept back a scream. Then the boat swung around
to her course—Ulrica's hold upon the tiller was a very steady one—
and in another minute they were sliding back safely before the wind.
In five minutes more they were in the smooth water of the bay.
Ulrica was the first to speak, and she spoke in most contrite tones.
"It was very, very wrong in me to do that, Mr. Maltham," she said.
"And it was wicked of me, too—for I have given my solemn promise
to father that I never will go out on the lake when it is rough at all.
Please, please forgive me for taking you into such danger in such a
foolish way. It was touch and go, you know, that we pulled through.
Please say that you forgive me. It will make me a little less wretched
if you do."
The danger was all over, and Maltham had got back both his color
and his courage again. "Why, it was nothing!" he said. "Or, rather, it
was a good deal—for it gave me a chance to see what a magnificent
sailor you are. And—and it was splendidly exciting out there, wasn't
it?"
"Wasn't it!" she echoed rapturously. "And oh," she went on, "I am so
glad that you take it that way! It is a real load off my mind! Will you
please take the tiller for a minute while I put up my hair?"
As she arranged the shining masses of her golden hair—her full
round arms uplifted, the wind pressing her draperies close about her
—Maltham watched her with a burning intentness. The glowing
reaction following escape from mortal peril was upon him and the
tide of his barely saved life was running full. In Ulrica's stronger
nature the same tide may have been running still more impetuously.
For an instant their eyes met. She flushed and looked away.
He did not speak, and the silence seemed to grow irksome to her.
She broke it, but with a perceptible effort, as she took the tiller
again. "Do you know," she said, "I did think for a minute that you
were scared." She laughed a little, and then went on more easily:
"And if you really had been scared I should have known, of course,
that you were not a gentleman! Was it not absurd?"
Her words roused him, and at the same time chilled him. "Yes, it was
very absurd," he answered not quite easily. And then, with presence
of mind added: "But I was scared, and badly scared—for you. I did
not see how I possibly could get you ashore if the boat filled."
"You could not have done it—we should have been drowned," Ulrica
replied with quiet conviction. "But because you are a gentleman it
was natural, I suppose, for you not to think about yourself and to
worry that way about me. You could not help it, of course—but I like
it, all the same."
Maltham reddened slightly. Instead of answering her he asked:
"Would you mind running up along the Point and landing me on the
other side of the canal? I want to hurry home and get into dry things
—and that will save me a lot of time, you know."
"Oh," she cried in a tone of deep concern, "are you not coming back
with me? I shall have a dreadful time with father, and I am counting
on you to help me through."
Maltham had foreseen that trouble with the Major was impending,
and wanted to keep out of it. He disliked scenes. "Of course, if you
want me to, I'll go back with you," he answered. And added,
drawing himself together and shivering a little, "I don't believe that I
shall catch much cold."
"What a selfish creature I am!" Ulrica exclaimed impetuously. "Of
course you must hurry home as fast as you can. What I shall get
from father will not be the half of what I deserve. And to think of my
thinking about your getting me off from a scolding at the cost of
your being ill! Please do not hate me for it—though you ought to, I
am sure!"
Having carried his point, Maltham could afford to be amiable again.
He looked straight into her eyes, and for an instant touched her
hand, as he said: "No, I shall not—hate you!" His voice was low. He
drawled slightly. The break gave to his phrase a telling emphasis.
It was not quite fair. He knew thoroughly the game that he was
playing; while Ulrica, save so far as her instinct might guide her, did
not know it at all. She did not answer him—and he was silent
because silence just then was the right move. And so they went on
without words until they were come to the landing-place beside the
canal. Even then—for he did not wish to weaken a strong impression
—he made the parting a short one: urging that she also must hurry
home and get on dry clothes. It did not strike her, either then or
later, that he would have shown a more practical solicitude in the
premises had he not made her come three miles out of her way.
Indeed, as she sailed those three miles back again, her mind was in
no condition to work clearly. In a confused way, that yet was very
delightful, she went over to herself the events of that wonderful day
—in which, as she vaguely realized, her girlhood had ended and her
womanhood had begun. But she dwelt most upon the look that he
had given her when he told her, with the break in his phrase, that he
would not hate her; and upon the touch of his hand at parting, and
his final speech, also with a break in it: "I shall see you to-morrow—
if you care to have me come."
At the club that evening Maltham wrote a very entertaining letter to
Miss Eleanor Strangford, in Chicago: telling her about the queer old
Major and his half-wild daughter, and how the daughter had taken
him out sailing and had brought him back drenched through. He was
a believer in frankness, and this letter—while not exhaustive—was of
a sort to put him right on the record in case an account of his
adventures should reach his correspondent by some other way. He
would have written it promptly in any circumstances. It was the
more apposite because he had promised to write every Sunday to
Miss Strangford—to whom he was engaged.
VII

Maltham left his office early the next afternoon and went down the
Point again. He had no headache, the wind had shifted to the
southward, and all about him was a flood of spring sunshine. Yet
even under these cheerful conditions he found the Point rather
drearily desolate. He gave the graveyard a wide berth when he came
to it, and looked away from it. His desire was strong that he might
forget where he had seen Ulrica's name for the first time. He was
not superstitious, exactly; but his sub-consciousness that the
direction in which he was sliding—along the lines of least resistance
—was at least questionable, made him rather open to feelings about
bad and good luck.
Being arrived at Eutaw Castle, he inferred from what the Major said
and from what Ulrica looked that the domestic storm of the previous
day had been a vigorous one—and was glad that he had kept out of
it. But it had blown over pretty well, and his good-natured chaff
about their adventure swept away the few remaining clouds.
"It is vehy handsome of yo', suh," said the Major, "to treat the
matteh as yo' do. My daughteh's conduct was most inexcusable—fo'
when she cahried yo' into that great dangeh she broke heh sacred
wo'd to me."
"But it was quite as much my fault as hers," Maltham answered. "I
should not have let her go. You see, the sailing was so delightfully
exciting that we both lost our heads a little. Luckily, I got mine back
before it was too late."
"Yo' behaved nobly, suh, nobly! My daughteh has told me how youah
only thought was of heh dangeh, and how white yo' went when yo'
realized youah inability to save heh if the boat went down. Those
weh the feelings of a gentleman, suh, and of a vehy gallant
gentleman—such as yo' suahly ah. Youah conduct could not have
been fineh, Mr. Maltham, had yo' been bo'n and bred in South
Cahrolina. Suh, I can say no mo' than that!"
Ulrica took little part in the talk. Her eyes were dull and she moved
languidly, as though she were weary. Not until her father left the
room—going to fetch his maps and charts, that he might
demonstrate the Point's glorious future—did she speak freely.
"I could not sleep last night, Mr. Maltham," she said hurriedly. "I lay
awake the whole night—thinking about what I had done, and about
what you must think about me for doing it. If I had drowned you,
after breaking my word to father that way, it would have been
almost murder. It was very noble of you, just now, to say that it was
as much your fault as it was mine. But it was not. It was my fault all
the way through."
"But the danger was just as great for you as it was for me," Maltham
answered. "You would have been drowned too, you know."
"Oh, that would not have counted. It would not have counted at all.
I should have got only what I deserved."
Maltham came close to her and took her hand. "Don't you think that
it would have counted for a good deal to me?" he asked. Then he
dropped her hand quickly and moved away from her as the Major re-
entered the room.
Inasmuch as he would have been drowned along with her, this
speech was lacking in logic; but Ulrica, who was not on the lookout
for logic just then, was more than satisfied with it. Suddenly she was
elate again. For the dread that had kept her wakeful had vanished:
his second thoughts about the peril into which she had taken him
had not set him against her—he still was the same! She could not
answer him with her lips, but she answered him with her eyes.
Maltham's feelings were complex as he saw the effect that his words
had upon her. He had made several resolutions not to say anything
of that sort to her again. Even if she did like flirting (as he had put it
in his own mind) it was not quite the thing, under the existing
conditions, for him to flirt with her. He resolutely kept the word
flirting well forward in his thoughts. It agreeably qualified the entire
situation. As he very well knew, Miss Strangford was not above
flirting herself. But it was not easy to classify under that head
Ulrica's sudden change in manner and the look that she had given
him. In spite of himself, his first impression of her would come back
and get in the way of the new impression that he very much wished
to form. When he first had seen her—only the day before, but time
does not count in the ordinary way in the case of those who have
been close to the gates of death together—he had felt the fire that
was in her, and had known that it slumbered. After what he had just
seen in her eyes he could not conquer the conviction that the fire
slumbered no longer and that he had kindled its strong flame.
Nor did he wholly wish to conquer this conviction. It was thrillingly
delightful to think that he had gained so great a power over her, for
all her queenliness, in so short a time. Over Miss Strangford—the
contrast was a natural one—he had very little power. That young
lady was not queenly, but she had a notable aptitude for ruling—and
came by it honestly, from a father whose hard head and hard hand
made him conspicuous even among Chicago men of affairs. It was
her strength that had attracted him to her; and the discovery that
with her strength was sweetness that had made him love her. He
was satisfied that she loved him in return—but he could not fancy
her giving him such a look as Ulrica had just given him; still less
could he fancy her whole being irradiated by a touch and a word.
And so he came again to the same half-formed conclusion that he
had come to in the boat on the preceding day: he would let matters
drift along pleasantly a little farther before he set them as they
should be with a strong hand.
This chain of thought went through his mind while the Major was
exhibiting the maps and expounding the Point's future; and his half-
conclusion was a little hastened by the Major's abrupt stop, and
sudden facing about upon him with: "I feah, suh, that yo' do not
quite follow me. If I have not made myself cleah, suh, I will present
the matteh in anotheh way."
Maltham shot a quizzical glance at Ulrica—which made her think that
she knew where his thoughts had been wool-gathering, and so
brought more light to her eyes—and answered with a becoming
gravity: "The fact is I didn't quite catch the point that you were
making, Major, and I'll be very much obliged if you'll take the trouble
to go over it again."
"It is no trouble—it is a pleasuah, suh," the Major replied with an
animated affability. And with that he was off again, and ran on for an
hour or more—until he had established the glorious future of
Minnesota Point in what he believed to be convincing terms. "When
the time to which I am looking fo'wa'd comes, Mr. Maltham, and it
will come vehy soon, suh," he said in enthusiastic conclusion, "it
stands to reason that the fortunes of this great metropolis of the
No'thwest will be fo'eveh and unchangeably established. Only I must
wahn yo', suh, that we must begin to get ready fo' it right away. We
must take time by the fo'lock and provide at once—I say at once,
suh—fo' the needs of that magnificent futuah that is almost heah
now!"
He took a long breath as he finished his peroration, and then came
down smiling to the level of ordinary conversation and added: "I
feah, Mr. Maltham, that I pehmit my enthusiasm to get away with
me a little. I feah I may even boah yo', suh. I promise not to say
anotheh wohd on the subject this evening. And now, as it is only a
little while befo' suppeh, we cannot do betteh, suh, than to take a
drink."
Maltham had not intended to stay to supper. He even had intended
not to. But he did—and on through the evening until the Major had
to warn him that he either must consent to sleep in Eutaw Castle or
else hurry along up the Point before the ferry-boat stopped running
for the night. The Major urged him warmly to stay. Finding that his
invitation certainly would not be accepted, he went off for a lantern
—and was rather put out when Maltham declined it and said that he
could find his way very well by the light of the stars.
Actually, Maltham did not find his way very well by the light of the
stars. Two or three times he ran against trees. Once—this was while
he was trying to give the graveyard a wide offing—he stumbled over
a root and fell heavily. When he got up again he found that he had
wrenched his leg, and that every step he took gave him intense
pain. But he was glad of his flounderings against trees, and of his
fall and the keen pain that followed it—for he was savage with
himself.
And yet it was not his fault, he grumbled. Why had the Major gone
off that way to hunt up a lantern—and so left them alone? Toward
the end of his walk—his pain having quieted his excitement, and so
lessened his hatred of himself—he added much more lightly: "But
what does a single kiss amount to, after all?"
VIII

It was on a day in the early autumn that Maltham at last decided


definitely—making effective his half-formed resolution of the spring-
time—to stop drifting and to set things as they should be with a
strong hand. But he had to admit, even as he formed this resolution,
that setting things quite as they should be no longer was within his
power.
The summer had gone quickly, most astonishingly quickly, he
thought; and for the most part pleasantly—though it had been
broken by certain interludes, not pleasant, during which he had been
even more savage with himself than he had been during that walk
homeward from Eutaw Castle in the dark. But, no matter how it had
gone, the summer definitely was ended—and so were his amusing
sessions with the Major over the future of Minnesota Point, and his
sails with Ulrica on the lake and about the bay. Ice already had
begun to form in the sheltered parts of the harbour, and the next
shift of wind into the North would close the port for the winter by
freezing everything hard and fast. All the big ships had steamed
away eastward. On the previous day he had despatched the last
vessel of his own line. His work for the season was over, and he was
ready to return to Chicago. In fact, he had his berth engaged on that
night's train. Moreover, in another month he was to be married: in
her latest letter Miss Strangford had fixed the day. Then they were
going over to the Riviera, and probably to Egypt. In the spring they
were coming back again, but not to Duluth nor even to Chicago. He
was to take charge of the Eastern office of the line, and their home
would be in New York. These various moves were so definite and so
final as to justify him in saying to himself, as he did say to himself,
that the Duluth episode was closed.
He had hesitated about going down to Eutaw Castle to say good-
bye, but in the end had perceived that the visit was a necessity. The
Major and Ulrica knew that he was to leave Duluth when navigation
was closed for the winter—indeed, of late, Ulrica had referred to that
fact frequently—but he had not confided to them the remainder of
his rather radical programme. He meant to do that later by letter—
from the Riviera or from Egypt. In the mean time, until he was
married and across the Atlantic, it was essential to keep unbroken
the friendly relations which had made his summer—even with its bad
interludes—so keenly delightful to him; and to go away without
paying a farewell visit he knew would be to risk a rupture that very
easily might lead on to a catastrophe. Moreover, as he said to
himself, there need not be anything final about it. Even though the
harbour did freeze, the railways remained open—and it was only
sixteen hours from Chicago to Duluth by the fast train. To suggest
that he might be running up again soon would be a very simple
matter: and would not be straining the truth, for he knew that the
pull upon him to run up in just that way would be almost irresistibly
strong.
In fact, the pull was of such strength that all of his not excessive will
power had to be exerted to make him go away at all—at least, to go
away alone. Very many times he had thought of the possibility of
reversing his programme completely: of making his wedding journey
with Ulrica, and of writing from some far-off place to Miss Strangford
that he had happened to marry somebody else and that she was
free. But each time that he had considered this alternative he had
realized that its cost would come too high: a break with his own
people, the loss of the good berth open to him in New York, the loss
of his share of Miss Strangford's share of the grain-elevators and
other desirable properties which would come to her when her father
died. But for these practical considerations, as he frequently and
sorrowingly had assured himself, he would not have hesitated for a
moment—being satisfied that, aside from them, such a reversal of
his plans would be better in every way. For he knew that while Miss
Strangford had and Ulrica had not his formal promise to marry her, it
was Ulrica who had the firmer hold upon his heart; and he also knew
that while Ulrica would meet his decision against her savagely—and,
as he believed, feebly—with her passion, Miss Strangford would
meet the reverse of that decision calmly and firmly with her
strength. The dilemma so nearly touched the verge of his endurance
that he even had contemplated evading it altogether by shooting
himself. But he had not got beyond contemplation. For that sort of
thing he was lacking in nerve.
It was because facing what he knew was a final parting—even
though Ulrica would not know it—would be so bitter hard for him
that he had hesitated about making his visit of good-bye. But when
he had decided that it was a necessity—that the risk involved in not
making it outweighed the pain that it would cost him—he came
about again: adding to his argument, almost with a sob, that he
could not go away like that, anyhow—that he must see her once
more!
And so he went down the Point again, knowing that he went for the
last time—and on much the same sort of a day, as it happened, as
that on which his first visit had been made: a grey, chill day, with a
strong wind drawing down the lake that tufted it with white-caps
and that sent a heavy surf booming in upon the shore. He had no
headache, but he had a heartache that was still harder to bear.
He had intended to take the tram-car—that he might hurry down to
the Castle, and get through with what he had to do there, and so
away again quickly. But when he had crossed the canal he let the
car go off without him—for the good reason that the meeting and
the parting might not come so soon. And for this same reason he
walked slowly, irresolutely. Once or twice he halted and almost
turned back. It all was very unlike his brisk, assured advance on that
far back day—ages before, it seemed to him—when he went down
the Point for the first time.
As he went onward, slowly, he was thinking about that day: how it
had been without intention that he turned eastward instead of
westward when he started on his walk; how a whim of the moment
had led him to cross the canal; how the mere chance of the three
church-bound women hurrying into the ferry-boat had prevented his
immediate return. He fell to wondering, dully, what "chance" is,
anyway—this force which with a grim humour uses our most
unconsidered actions for the making or the unmaking of our lives;
and the hopeless puzzle of it all kept his mind unprofitably employed
until he had passed the last of the little houses, and had gone on
through the stunted pines, and so was come to the desolate
graveyard.
He did not shun the graveyard, as he had shunned it all the summer
long. The need for that was past—now that, in reality, Ulrica's name
had come to be to him a name upon a grave. For a while he stood
with his arms resting on the broken fence, looking before him in a
dull way and feeling a dull surprise because he found the dismal
place still precisely as he remembered it. That in so very long a time
it should not have become more ruinous seemed to him
unreasonable. Then he walked on past the little church, still slowly
and hesitatingly, and so came at last to the Castle. Oddly enough,
the Major was standing again at the same lower window, and saw
him, and came out to welcome him. For a moment he had a queer
feeling that perhaps it still was that first day—that he might have
been dozing in the pine woods, somewhere, and that the past
summer was all a dream.
The Major was beaming with friendliness. "Aha, Masteh Geo'ge, I'm
glad to see yo' and to congratulate yo'!" he said heartily. And he
gave Maltham a cordial dig in the ribs as he added: "Yo' ah a sly
dog, a vehy sly dog, my boy, to keep youah secret from us! But I
happened to be up in town yestehday, and by the mehest chance I
met Captain Todd, of youah boat, and he told me why yo' ah going
back to Chicago in such a huhy, suh! It is a great match, a
magnificent match that yo' ah making, Geo'ge, and I congratulate
yo' with all my haht. I should be glad of the oppo'tunity to
congratulate Miss Strangfo'd also. Fo' I am not flattehing yo', Geo'ge,
when I tell yo' that she could not have found a betteh husband had
she gone to look fo' him in South Cahrolina. Suh, I can say no mo'
than that!"
The Major's speech was long enough, fortunately, for Maltham to get
over the shock of its beginning before he had to answer it. But even
with that breathing space his answer was so lame that the Major
had to invent an excuse for its lack of heartiness. "I don't doubt that
afteh youah chilly walk, Geo'ge, yo' ah half frozen," he said. "Come
right in and have a drink. It will do yo' good, suh. It will take the
chill out of youah bones!"
Maltham was glad to accept this invitation, and the size of the drink
that he took did the Major's heart good. "That's right, Geo'ge!" he
said with great approval. "A South-Cahrolinian couldn't show a
betteh appreciation of good liquoh than that!" He raised his glass
and continued: "I drink, suh, to Miss Strangfo'd's health, and to
youahs. May yo' both have the long lives of happiness that yo' both
desehve!"
He put down his empty glass and added: "I will call Ulrica. She will
be glad to see yo' and to offeh yo' heh congratulations." He paused
for a moment, and then went on in a less cheerful tone: "But I must
wahn yo', Geo'ge, that she has a bad headache and is not quite
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