t
was in, and I'll see that it's put into a good strong one, next time."

"Do! That's a good fellow!" said Gaites, and in repeated promises,
demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill
Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.

III.

Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and
after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent
Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss
Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has
outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in
plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired
fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more
remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed;
at half past one o'clock he dined at somebody's cottage, and afterwards
sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time
to go to afternoon tea at somebody else's cottage, where he chatted
about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for
seven or eight o'clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.

There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old
college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a
perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less
simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was
never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out
canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go "just as he
was," and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he
had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type
than Gaites himself had on.

The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river
sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the
river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy
to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well
that he told people he was never going away.

He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs.
Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse
of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay
another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she
alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had
ma