we would have an unreasonably good supper and afterward climb the ladder
to the lantern to see the lamps lighted, and sit there for a while
watching the ships and the sunset. Almost all the coasters came in sight
of Deephaven, and the sea outside the light was their grand highway.
Twice from the lighthouse we saw a yacht squadron like a flock of great
white birds. As for the sunsets, it used to seem often as if we were
near the heart of them, for the sea all around us caught the color of
the clouds, and though the glory was wonderful, I remember best one
still evening when there was a bank of heavy gray clouds in the west
shutting down like a curtain, and the sea was silver-colored. You could
look under and beyond the curtain of clouds into the palest, clearest
yellow sky. There was a little black boat in the distance drifting
slowly, climbing one white wave after another, as if it were bound out
into that other world beyond. But presently the sun came from behind the
clouds, and the dazzling golden light changed the look of everything,
and it was the time then to say one thought it a beautiful sunset; while
before one could only keep very still, and watch the boat, and wonder if
heaven would not be somehow like that far, faint color, which was
neither sea nor sky.

When we came down from the lighthouse and it grew late, we would beg for
an hour or two longer on the water, and row away in the twilight far out
from land, where, with our faces turned from the Light, it seemed as if
we were alone, and the sea shoreless; and as the darkness closed round
us softly, we watched the stars come out, and were always glad to see
Kate's star and my star, which we had chosen when we were children. I
used long ago to be sure of one thing,--that, however far away heaven
might be, it could not be out of sight of the stars. Sometimes in the
evening we waited out at sea for the moonrise, and then we would take
the oars again and go slowly in, once in a while singing or talking, but
oftenest silent.

_My Lady Brandon and the Widow Jim_

When it was known that we had arrived in Deephaven, the people who had
known Miss Brandon so well, and Mrs. Lancaster also, seemed to consider
themselves Kate's friends by inheritance, and were exceedingly polite to
us, in either calling upon us or sending pleasant messages. Before the
first week had ended we had no lack of society. They were not strangers
to Kate, to begin with, and as for me,