asked.

"Well, he isn't old," said Jane, "and he's an artist."

Becky was not in the least interested in Mr. Cope, go she talked to
Tristram until he had to go back to his farm and the cows that waited
to be milked. Then Becky went into her room, and took off her hat and
coat and ran a comb through the bronze waves of her hair. She did not
change the straight serge frock in which she had travelled. She went
back into the front room and found that Mr. Cope had come.

He was not old. That was at once apparent. And he was not young. He
did not look in the least like an artist. He seemed, rather, like a
prosperous business man. He wore a Norfolk suit, and his reddish hair
was brushed straight back from his forehead. He had rather humorous
gray eyes, and Becky thought there was a look of delicacy about his
white skin. Later he spoke of having come for his health, and she
learned that he had a weak heart.

He had a pleasant laughing voice. He belonged to Boston, but had lived
abroad for years.

"With nothing to show for it," he told her with a shrug, "but one
portrait. I painted my sister, and she kept that. But before we left
Paris we burned the rest----"

"Oh, how dreadful," Becky cried.

"No, it wasn't dreadful. They were not worth keeping. You see, I
played a lot and made sketches and things, and then there was the
war--and I wasn't very well."

He had had two years of aviation, and after that a desk in the War
Department.

"And now I am painting again."

"Gardens?" Becky asked, "or the sea?"

"Neither. I am trying to paint the moor. I'll show you in the
morning."

The Admiral was in the kitchen, superintending the chowder. Jane knew
how to make it, and he knew that she knew. But he always went into the
kitchen at the psychological moment, tied on an apron, and put in the
pilot crackers. Then he brought the chowder in, in a big porcelain
tureen which was shaped like a goose. Becky loved him in his white
apron, with his round red face, and the porcelain goose held high.

"If you could paint him like that," she suggested to Archibald Cope.

"Do you think he would let me?" eagerly.

After supper the two men smoked by the fire, and Becky sat between them
and watched the blaze. She heard very little of the conversation. Her
mind was in Albemarle. How far away it seemed! Just three nights ago
she had danced at the Merriweathers' ball, and George had held her hand
as she leaned over t