ght not have escaped that slight moisture which excitement and doubt
had brought to his temples and his palms.

These miles of railway travel since he had reached the Cape had been so
many separate reminders of the past and he had not arrived unshaken.

But there on the platform stood Conscience Tollman, with a serene smile
of welcome on her lips, and as the chauffeur took his bags she led him
to the waiting car.

"Come on," she said, as though there had been no lapse of years since
they had stood here before, "there's just time to get into our bathing
suits and have a swim before luncheon."

The main street of the village with the shade of its elms and silver
oaks, and the white of tidy houses, setting among flowers, was a page
out of a book long closed; a book in which had been written the most
unforgettable things of life. Besides well-remembered features, there
were details which had been forgotten and which now set free currents of
reminiscence--such as the battered figurehead of an old schooner raised
on high over a front door and a wind-mill as antique of pattern as those
to which Don Quixote gave battle.

And when the winding street ran out into a sandy country road Stuart
found himself amid surroundings that teemed with the spirit of the past.

But over all the bruising comparisons of past and present, the peace of
the sky was like a benediction, and his weariness yielded to its calming
influence. He had been away and had come back tired, and for the
present, it was better to ignore all the revolutionary changes that lay
between then and now.

They talked about trivial things, along the way, with a lightness of
manner, which was none the less as delicately cautious as the footsteps
of a cat walking on a shelf of fragile china. Each felt the challenge
and response of natures keyed to the same pitch of life's tuning fork.

"Why are all the Cape Cod wagons painted blue and all the barn doors
green?" asked the man, and Conscience demanded in return, "Why does
everything that man controls in New England follow a fixed color of
thought?"

When the car drew up before the house which he remembered as a miser's
abode, his astonishment was freshly stirred. Here was a place
transformed, with a dignified beauty of residence and grounds which
could scarcely be bettered.

"How did the play go?" demanded Tollman from the doorway, with an
interest that seemed as surprising as that of a Trappist Abbot for a
matter o