here oughtn't to be no
bargaining like that among the race that knows Joseph. I'll come when
I can, and you come when you can, and so long's we have our pleasant
little chat it don't matter a mite what roof's over us."

Captain Jim took a great fancy to Gog and Magog, who were presiding
over the destinies of the hearth in the little house with as much
dignity and aplomb as they had done at Patty's Place.

"Aren't they the cutest little cusses?" he would say delightedly; and
he bade them greeting and farewell as gravely and invariably as he did
his host and hostess. Captain Jim was not going to offend household
deities by any lack of reverence and ceremony.

"You've made this little house just about perfect," he told Anne. "It
never was so nice before. Mistress Selwyn had your taste and she did
wonders; but folks in those days didn't have the pretty little curtains
and pictures and nicknacks you have. As for Elizabeth, she lived in
the past. You've kinder brought the future into it, so to speak. I'd
be real happy even if we couldn't talk at all, when I come here--jest
to sit and look at you and your pictures and your flowers would be
enough of a treat. It's beautiful--beautiful."

Captain Jim was a passionate worshipper of beauty. Every lovely thing
heard or seen gave him a deep, subtle, inner joy that irradiated his
life. He was quite keenly aware of his own lack of outward comeliness
and lamented it.

"Folks say I'm good," he remarked whimsically upon one occasion, "but I
sometimes wish the Lord had made me only half as good and put the rest
of it into looks. But there, I reckon He knew what He was about, as a
good Captain should. Some of us have to be homely, or the purty
ones--like Mistress Blythe here--wouldn't show up so well."

One evening Anne and Gilbert finally walked down to the Four Winds
light. The day had begun sombrely in gray cloud and mist, but it had
ended in a pomp of scarlet and gold. Over the western hills beyond the
harbor were amber deeps and crystalline shallows, with the fire of
sunset below. The north was a mackerel sky of little, fiery golden
clouds. The red light flamed on the white sails of a vessel gliding
down the channel, bound to a southern port in a land of palms. Beyond
her, it smote upon and incarnadined the shining, white, grassless faces
of the sand dunes. To the right, it fell on the old house among the
willows up the brook, and gave it for a fleeting space c