r fog. Flocks
of gulls rose and dipped and rose again, or rested unafraid on the
wooden posts of the pier.

The 'Sconset 'bus was waiting and they took it. Until two years ago no
automobiles had been allowed on the island, but there had been the
triumph of utility over the picturesque and quaint, and now one motored
across the moor on smooth asphalt, in one-half the time that the trip
had been made in the old days.

The Admiral did not like it. He admitted that it was quicker. "But we
used to see the pheasants fly up from the bushes, and the ducks from the
pools, and now they are gone before we can get our eyes on them."

Becky was not in a captious mood. The moor was before her, rising and
falling in low unwooded hills, amber with dwarf goldenrod, red with the
turning huckleberry, purple with drying grasses, green with a thousand
lovely growing things still unpainted by the brush of autumn. The color
was almost unbelievably gorgeous. Even the pools by the roadside were
almost unbelievably blue, as if the water had been dyed with indigo, and
above all was that incredible blue sky----!

Then out of the distance clear cut like cardboard the houses lifted
themselves above the horizon, with the sea a wall to the right, and to
the left, across the moor, the Sankaty lighthouse, white and red with
the sun's rays striking across it.

They entered the village between rows of pleasant informal residences,
many of them closed until another season; they passed the tennis
courts, and came to the post-office, with its flag flying. The 'bus
stopped, and they found Tristram waiting for them.

"Tristram" is an old name in Nantucket. There was a Tristram among the
nine men who had purchased the island from Thomas Mayhew in 1659 for "30
pounds current pay and two beaver hats." The present Tristram wore the
name appropriately. Fair-haired and tall, not young but towards the
middle-years, strong with the strength of one who lives out-of-doors in
all weathers, browned with the wind and sun, blue-eyed, he called no man
master, and was the owner of his own small acres.

Like the Admiral, he gave himself up for two months of the year to the
summer people. If his association with them was a business rather than a
social affair, it was, none the less, interesting. The occupation of
Nantucket by "off-islanders" was a matter of infinite speculation and
amusement. Into the serenity of his life came restless men and women who
golfed and swam