asements more
splendid than those of an old cathedral. They glowed out of its quiet
and grayness like the throbbing, blood-red thoughts of a vivid soul
imprisoned in a dull husk of environment.

"That old house up the brook always seems so lonely," said Anne. "I
never see visitors there. Of course, its lane opens on the upper
road--but I don't think there's much coming and going. It seems odd
we've never met the Moores yet, when they live within fifteen minutes'
walk of us. I may have seen them in church, of course, but if so I
didn't know them. I'm sorry they are so unsociable, when they are our
only near neighbors."

"Evidently they don't belong to the race that knows Joseph," laughed
Gilbert. "Have you ever found out who that girl was whom you thought
so beautiful?"

"No. Somehow I have never remembered to ask about her. But I've never
seen her anywhere, so I suppose she must have been a stranger. Oh, the
sun has just vanished--and there's the light."

As the dusk deepened, the great beacon cut swathes of light through it,
sweeping in a circle over the fields and the harbor, the sandbar and
the gulf.

"I feel as if it might catch me and whisk me leagues out to sea," said
Anne, as one drenched them with radiance; and she felt rather relieved
when they got so near the Point that they were inside the range of
those dazzling, recurrent flashes.

As they turned into the little lane that led across the fields to the
Point they met a man coming out of it--a man of such extraordinary
appearance that for a moment they both frankly stared. He was a
decidedly fine-looking person-tall, broad-shouldered, well-featured,
with a Roman nose and frank gray eyes; he was dressed in a prosperous
farmer's Sunday best; in so far he might have been any inhabitant of
Four Winds or the Glen. But, flowing over his breast nearly to his
knees, was a river of crinkly brown beard; and adown his back, beneath
his commonplace felt hat, was a corresponding cascade of thick, wavy,
brown hair.

"Anne," murmured Gilbert, when they were out of earshot, "you didn't
put what Uncle Dave calls 'a little of the Scott Act' in that lemonade
you gave me just before we left home, did you?"

"No, I didn't," said Anne, stifling her laughter, lest the retreating
enigma should hear here. "Who in the world can he be?"

"I don't know; but if Captain Jim keeps apparitions like that down at
this Point I'm going to carry cold iron in my pocket whe