doesn't alter that." There was a pause, then suddenly the
girl laughed and stretched both arms out to sea. "Oh, well," she said,
"I don't often indulge in these jeremiads. Now it's over, and I've at
least got the summer ahead of me. I guess we'd better go back. I
promised Billy a dance."

She rose, but the Virginian stood resolutely in her path. "Just a moment
more," he begged. "It won't be love-making. The day we drove down to
Provincetown you were sitting on the sand dunes. For a background you
had the sea and sky--and they were gorgeous. But while I looked at it I
saw another picture, too. May I try to paint _that_ picture for you?"

"Surely, if you will."

"Well, I'm rather leaving the sunlight now," he admitted. "I'm painting
gray. I'm converting it into terms of winter storm and equinox. Last
year a ship was pounded to pieces in the bay while the people on
Commercial street looked helplessly on. It was the same sea, but it
wasn't smiling then. It wore the vindictive scowl of death. That's the
mood which has made this strip of coast a grave-yard of dead ships.
That's the mood, too, which has given color to the people's thought--or
taken the color out of it, leaving it stout and faded like weatherbeaten
timbers--making of it the untrustworthy thought of melancholia."

"And am I the spirit of that picture, too?"

"You are the exact antithesis of all that, but you are threatening to
fade into its grayness--and to deaden all the glow that was on the
palette with which God painted you."

They walked slowly back to the verandah, but paused a space before going
into the light and crowds where a waltz had just begun--and as they
waited a hotel page came dodging between the smoking, chatting loungers
calling her name--"Miss Conscience Williams--Miss Conscience Williams,"
and waving a yellow telegraph envelope.

The girl's face paled a little as she took the message from the urchin's
hand and her eyes widened in an expression of fear. But she tore the
covering and drew out the sheet deliberately, reading in the yellow
light that flooded through a window. Then an almost inaudible groan came
from her lips and she stood holding the paper so loosely that it slipped
from her fingers and drifted to the floor. Stuart retrieved it and
handed it to her, but she only commanded in a stunned voice, "Read it."

The man stepped from the shadow to the light and read:

"Your father had paralytic stroke. He wants to see you."

It