appeared from behind the clump of bayberry bushes and walked onward
together, his arm about her waist. The pair on the knoll saw the
parting.

Lulie ran up the path and the door of the light keeper's cottage closed
behind her. Howard disappeared around the bend of the hill. Martha and
Galusha turned hastily and began walking toward home. Neither spoke
until they were almost there. Then Miss Phipps, apparently feeling that
something should be said, observed: "The moon was--was real pretty,
wasn't it, Mr. Bangs?"

Galusha started. "Eh?" he queried. "Oh, yes! yes, indeed! Ah--quite so."

He made the next remark also; it was quite irrelevant.

"Youth," he said, musingly. "Youth is a wonderful thing, really it is."

Possibly his companion understood his thought, or had been thinking
along the same line herself. At all events she agreed. "Yes, it is," she
said. "It is so. And most of us don't realize how wonderful until it's
gone."

From the shadows by the gate Lucy Larcom sprang aloft to knock another
beetle galley-west. Lucy was distinctly a middle-aged cat, but he did
not allow the fact to trouble him. He gathered his June bugs while he
might and did not stop to dream vain dreams of vanished youth.

CHAPTER XV

Early June came to Gould's Bluffs. The last of the blossoms fell from
the apple and pear trees in the Phipps' orchard, there were young
swallows in the nests beneath the eaves of the shed, and tulips and
hyacinths gave color and fragrance to the flower beds in the front yard.
Down in the village Ras Beebe began his twice-a-year window dressing,
removing the caps, candy, sweaters, oil heaters, patent medicines and
mittens to substitute bathing suits, candy, straw hats, toy shovels,
patent medicines and caps. Small boys began barefoot experiments.
Miss Tamson Black departed for Nantucket to visit a cousin. Mr. Raish
Pulcifer had his wife resurrect his black-and-white striped flannel
trousers from the moth chest and hang them in the yard. "No use
talkin'," so Zach Bloomer declared, "summer is headin' down our way.
She'll be here afore we know it."

She was. One pleasant morning Galusha, emerging from the Phipps' "side
door," saw workmen about the premises of the Restabit Inn. For a week
thereafter the neighborhood echoed with hammer blows and reeked with the
smell of new paint. The Restabit Inn, shaking off its winter shabbiness,
emerged scrubbed, darned, patched and pressed, so to speak, in its
last--