once or twice, taken this same sail, but he had endured in patience
rather than enjoyed it.

On those occasions Ira had revealed a surly personality, which now
expanded and mellowed into conversation as Haymond asked questions about
the setting of eel traps and lobster pots and the management of fish
weirs.

The wind toyed so persistently with Conscience's dark hair that she took
it down from its coils and let it hang in heavy braids. The color rose
in her cheeks and the gleam to her eyes making them starry, and a lilt
sang in her voice.

There was a wealth of sapphire and purple in the water; there were thin
shore lines of vivid green and dazzling sand. Sails bronzed and reddened
in the sun and the distance. Gulls quarreled and screamed as they
fished--and everything was young.

"Them's mackerel gulls," volunteered Ira as he pointed to two birds
perched on a precariously buffeted buoy. "There's a sayin' that 'When
the whippoorwills begin to call, the mackerel begins to run'--then the
gulls come, too."

But as the sailboat drew near its landing stage again and the sunset was
fading into twilight, the fires died slowly, too, in the eyes of
Conscience Tollman and she felt that a vacation had ended.

There seemed to be in the sunlight of the following morning a tempered
and Sabbath stillness.

Perhaps the sun itself remained pagan, but if so it only lent contrast
to the slumberous restfulness where the shadows fell.

Over the countryside brooded the calm peacefulness of the day and when
the church bell gave its first call, its notes floated out across
silences disturbed by no noisier interruptions than bird notes and the
distant voice of the surf.

When her father had expressed his determination of going, for the first
time since he had been stricken, to the church where he had so long
preached, Conscience had demurred without avail. She had been, at first,
alarmed, lest the associations dwelling between those walls might excite
him beyond his strength. He must feel that he was going back, broken, to
a place where, in strength, he had been a mentor and potter whose clay
was human thought. But he would listen to no objections and when the
congregation gathered, his invalid's chair stood at the head of the
center aisle and he looked directly up at the pulpit from which, since
his youth, he had thundered the damnation of sinners.

When the tall young man took his place in the pulpit, the aged minister
swung his