hs of her vacation were given to her mother's
father, Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from
whale-hunting ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick
house, but it had no acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket
town, with a Captain's walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its
middle.

The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.

Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew
nothing of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her
an open sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell
of dreams.

"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."

He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when
his father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the
Judge's household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy
sat up half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at
dawn, and dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble
slab, and helped his wife with the mayonnaise.

When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been
sold by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack
punch----! Old times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with
the air of one who accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood
staunchly by the Administration. If the President had asked the
sacrifice of his head, he would have offered it on the platter of
political allegiance.

So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.

Bec