were going to be like that, and I regard it as extremely hospitable of
you not to be. You are more like--like what now?" Miss Stapylton put her
head to one side and considered the contents of her vocabulary,--"you
are like a viking. I shall call you Olaf," she announced, when she had
reached a decision.

This, look you, to the most dignified man in Lichfield,--a person who
had never borne a nickname in his life. You must picture for yourself
how the colonel stood before her, big, sturdy and blond, and glared down
at her, and assured himself that he was very indignant; like Timanthes,
the colonel's biographer prefers to draw a veil before the countenance
to which art is unable to do justice.

Then, "I have no admiration for the Northmen," Rudolph Musgrave
declared, stiffly. "They were a rude and barbarous nation, proverbially
addicted to piracy and intemperance."

"My goodness gracious!" Miss Stapylton observed,--and now, for the
first time, he saw the teeth that were like grains of rice upon a pink
rose petal. Also, he saw dimples. "And does one mean all that by a
viking?"

"The vikings," he informed her--and his Library manner had settled upon
him now to the very tips of his fingers--"were pirates. The word is of
Icelandic origin, from _vik_, the name applied to the small inlets along
the coast in which they concealed their galleys. I may mention that Olaf
was not a viking, but a Norwegian king, being the first Christian
monarch to reign in Norway."

"Dear me!" said Miss Stapylton; "how interesting!"