“Who were the writers?” Mr. Lind asked.

Brand named two or three, and instantly the attention of the others seemed arrested.

“Oh, that is the sort of literature you have been reading?” he said, with a quick glance.

“I have had some days’ idleness.”

“Excuse me,” said the other, with a smile; “but I think you might have spent it better.  That kind of literature only leads to disorder and anarchy.  It may have been useful at one time; it is useful no longer.  Enough of ploughing has been done:  we want sowing done now—­we want writers who will build up instead of pulling down.  Those Nihilists,” he added, almost with a sigh, “are becoming more and more impracticable.  They aim at scarcely anything beyond destruction.”

Here Natalie changed the conversation.  This was too bright and beautiful a day to admit of despondency.

“I suppose you love the sea, Mr. Brand?” she said.  “All Englishmen do.  And yachting—­I suppose you go yachting?”

“I have tried it; but it is too tedious for me,” said Brand.  “The sort of yachting I like is in a vessel of five thousand tons, going three hundred and eighty miles a day.  With half a gale of wind in your teeth in the ‘rolling Forties,’ then there is some fun.”

“I must go over to the States very soon,” Mr. Lind said.

“Papa!”

“The worst of it is,” her father said, without heeding that exclamation of protest, “that I have so much to do that can only be done by word of mouth.”

“I wish I could take the message for you,” Brand said, lightly.  “When the weather looks decent, I very often take a run across to New York, put up for a few days at the Brevoort House, and take the next ship home.  It is very enjoyable, especially if you know the officers.  Then the bagman—­I have acquired a positive love for the bagman.”

“The what?” said Natalie.

“The bagman.  The ‘commy’ his friends call him.  The commercial traveller, don’t you know?  He is a most capital fellow—­full of life and fun, desperately facetious, delighting in practical jokes:  altogether a wonderful creature.  You begin to think you are in another generation—­before England became melancholy—­the generation, for example, that roared over the adventures of Tom and Jerry.”

Natalie did not know who Tom and Jerry were; but that was of little consequence; for at this moment they began to descry “the white chalk-line beyond the sea”—­the white line of the English coast.  And they went on chatting cheerfully; and the sunlight flashed its diamonds on the blue waters around them, and the white chalk cliffs became more distinct.

“And yet it seems so heartless for one to be going back to idleness,” Natalie Lind said, absently.  “Papa works as hard in England as anywhere else; but what can I do?  To think of one going back to peaceful days, and comfort, and pleasant friends, when others have to go through such misery, and to fight against such persecution!  When Vjera Sassulitch offered me her hand—­”