purpose. And Mr. Bland, his broken heart forgot,
slumbers over there." She pointed to the haberdasher inert in a big
chair drawn up near the clerk's desk. "Only you and I in all the world
awake."

"Pretty lonesome, isn't it?" Mr. Magee glanced over his shoulder at the
shadows that crept in on them.

"I was finding it very busy when you came," she answered. "You see, I
have known the inn when it was gay with summer people, and as I sat here
by the fire I pretended I saw the ghosts of a lot of the people I knew
flitting about in the dusk. The rocking-chair fleet sailed by--"

"The what?"

"Black flag flying, decks cleared for action--I saw the rocking-chair
fleet go by." She smiled faintly. "We always called them that. Bitter,
unkind old women who sat hour after hour on the veranda, and rocked and
gossiped, and gossiped and rocked. All the old women in the world seem
to gather at summer hotels. And, oh, the cruel mouths the fleet
had--just thin lines of mouths--I used to look at them and wonder if any
one had ever kissed them."

The girl's eyes were very large and tender in the firelight.

"And I saw some poor little ghosts weeping in a corner," she went on; "a
few that the fleet had run down and sunk in the sea of gossip. A little
ghost whose mother had not been all she should have been, and the fleet
found it out, and rocked, and whispered, and she went away. And a few
who were poor--the most terrible of sins--to them the fleet showed no
mercy. And a fine proud girl, Myra Thornhill, who was engaged to a man
named Kendrick, and who never dared come here again after Kendrick
suddenly disappeared, because of the whispered dishonors the fleet
heaped upon his head."

"What wicked women!" said Magee.

"The wickedest women in the world," answered the girl. "But every summer
resort must have its fleet. I doubt if any other ever had its admiral,
though--and that makes Baldpate supreme."

"Its admiral?"

"Yes. He isn't really that, I imagine--sort of a vice, or an assistant,
or whatever it is, long ago retired from the navy. Every summer he comes
here, and the place revolves about him. It's all so funny. I wonder if
any other crowd attains such heights of snobbishness as that at a summer
resort? It's the admiral this, and the admiral that, from the moment he
enters the door. Nearly every day the manager of Baldpate has a new
picture of the admiral taken, and hangs it here in the hotel. I'll show
them to you when it'