the-wisp
with her fancy, leading it ever farther astray in a bottomless bog of
black bewilderment.

None the less, she had just succeeded in establishing to her own
satisfaction the probability that her sponsor had been, if not active
in, at least acquainted with the business of the signals--reasoning
shrewdly upon that lady's high-handed treatment of Sally's insinuation
as inconsequential--when Mr. Trego elected to appear for breakfast.

That unhappy young man had been more wise if he had not taken it for
granted that nine o'clock would be too early for Sally as well as for
everybody else who didn't make breakfast in bed a habit; and a more
diplomatic person would have been at pains to prepare himself against
that inevitable rencontre with a young woman of exacerbated
sensibilities. Nothing could have been more surely predestined to
ghastly failure than his cheerful assumption of a complete
understanding, with the hint implicit that, having done Sally a
signal service, he was willing to let bygones be bygones and take as
tacit a sense of obligation not easy for her to express.

"Hel-lo!" he saluted the charming vision of her with undisguised
pleasure and surprise. "You down already? Why, I made sure I had at
least two hours' lead of the field."

"Yes," Sally agreed quietly; "I am early, I presume."

"Want to be careful," Trego cautioned; "it's hardly the thing, this
early rising, you know; it's not really clawss; it isn't done."

Sally said nothing. It was safer not to. And cheerfully unaware of her
self-restraint, Trego armed himself with a plate and foraged at the
side-table, with its array of silver-hooded hot-water dishes.

"Been for a swim," he volunteered with a thrill of coarse creature
satisfaction in his tone. "Wonderful water along this coast--not too
warm, like the Jersey beaches--to my taste, anyway, and not too
all-fired cold, as it generally is north of the Cape, but just right.
Like bathing in champagne properly chilled. No such pick-me-up in the
world as a dip in the cool of the morning. You should have tried it."

"I dare say," said Sally briefly, and was very glad she hadn't. "But
that dreadfully long climb up from the beach--" she amended,
feeling it obligatory upon her not to seem too short of civility.

"You don't mind that when you come to it after a swim," Trego
declared. "It's only in anticipation, when you're snug between sheets
and debating the rival claims of the distant beach and y