ffice. At least a
dozen male citizens of East Harniss were thinking that very thing at
that very moment. It was a community habit of long standing to see the
train come in and go after the mail. The facts that the train bore no
passengers in whom you were intimately interested, and that you expected
no mail made little difference. If you were a man of thirty or older,
you went to the depot or the "club," just as your wife or sisters went
to the sewing circle, for sociability and mild excitement. If you were
a single young man you went to the post office for the same reason that
you attended prayer meeting. If you were a single young lady you went
to the post office and prayer meeting to furnish a reason for the young
man.

Mr. Phinney, replacing his watch in his pocket, meandered to the
sidewalk and looked down the hill and along the length of the "Shore
Road." Beside the latter highway stood a little house, painted a
spotless white, its window blinds a vivid green. In that house dwelt,
and dwelt alone, Captain Solomon Berry, Sim Phinney's particular
friend. Captain Sol was the East Harniss depot master and, from long
acquaintance, Mr. Phinney knew that he should be through supper and
ready to return to the depot, by this time. The pair usually walked
thither together when the evening meal was over.

But, except for the smoke curling lazily from the kitchen chimney,
there was no sign of life about the Berry house. Either Captain Sol had
already gone, or he was not yet ready to go. So Mr. Phinney decided that
waiting was chancey, and set out alone.

He climbed Cross Street to where the "Hill Boulevard," abiding place of
East Harniss's summer aristocracy, bisected it, and there, standing on
the corner, and consciously patronizing the spot where he so stood, was
Mr. Ogden Hapworth Williams, no less.

Mr. Williams was the village millionaire, patron, and, in a gentlemanly
way, "boomer." His estate on the Boulevard was the finest in the county,
and he, more than any one else, was responsible for the "buying up"
by wealthy people from the city of the town's best building sites, the
spots commanding "fine marine sea views," to quote from Abner Payne,
local real estate and insurance agent. His own estate was fine enough to
be talked about from one end of the Cape to the other and he had bought
the empty lot opposite and made it into a miniature park, with flower
beds and gravel walks, though no one but he or his might pick