cottage. Well, Pen, how are the folks?" He looked half-way
round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear upon her he
was able to give her a wink of supreme content. The Colonel, with no
sort of ulterior design, and nothing but his triumph over Mrs. Lapham
definitely in his mind, was feeling, as he would have said, about right.

The girl smiled a daughter's amusement at her father's boyishness. "I
don't think there's much change since morning. Did Irene have a
headache when you left?"

"No," said the Colonel.

"Well, then, there's that to report."

"Pshaw!" said the Colonel with vexation in his tone.

"I'm sorry Miss Irene isn't well," said Corey politely.

"I think she must have got it from walking too long on the beach. The
air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun is."

"Yes, that's true," assented Corey.

"A good night's rest will make it all right," suggested the Colonel,
without looking round. "But you girls have got to look out."

"If you're fond of walking," said Corey, "I suppose you find the beach
a temptation."

"Oh, it isn't so much that," returned the girl. "You keep walking on
and on because it's so smooth and straight before you. We've been here
so often that we know it all by heart--just how it looks at high tide,
and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm. We're as
well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly-fish as we are with
the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under
umbrellas. I think they're always the same, all of them."

The Colonel left the talk to the young people. When he spoke next it
was to say, "Well, here we are!" and he turned from the highway and
drove up in front of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof, and a group
of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop formed by
the road. It was treeless and bare all round, and the ocean,
unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone's-cast
from the cottage. A hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and
Mrs. Lapham was on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her
belated husband's excuses, which she was obliged to check on her tongue
at sight of Corey.

VII.

THE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his seat. "I've
brought Mr. Corey with me," he nonchalantly explained.

Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel showed him to his
room, briefly assuring himself that there was noth