is head. "There's--there's only your poor mother's
half-brother down on the Cape."

"What half-brother?" demanded Louise with a quick smile that matched the
professor's quizzical one.

"Why----Well, your mother, Lou, had an older half-brother, a Mr. Silt.
He keeps a store at Cardhaven. You know, I met your mother down that way
when I was hunting seaweed for the Smithsonian Institution. Your
grandmother was a Bellows and her folks lived on the Cape, too. Her
family has died out and your grandfather was dead before I married your
mother. The half-brother, this Mr. Silt--Captain Abram Silt--is the only
individual of that branch of the family left alive, I believe."

"Goodness!" gasped the girl. "What a family tree!"

Again the professor smiled whimsically. "Only a few of the branches.
But they all reach back to the first navigators of the world."

"The first navigators?"

"I do not mean to the Phoenicians," her father said. "I mean that the
world never saw braver nor more worthy sailors than those who called the
wind-swept hamlets of Cape Cod their home ports. The Silts were all
master-mariners. This Captain Abe is a bachelor, I believe. You could
not very well go there."

Louise sighed. "No; I couldn't go there--I suppose. I couldn't go
there----" Her voice wandered off into silence. Then suddenly, almost
explosively, it came back with the question: "Why couldn't I?"

"My dear Lou! What would your aunt say?" gasped the professor.

He was a tall, rather soldierly looking man--the result of military
training in his youth--with a shock of perfectly white hair and a
sweeping mustache that contrasted clearly with his pink, always cleanly
shaven cheeks and chin. Without impressing the observer with his
muscular power. Professor Grayling was a better man on a long hike and
possessed more reserve strength than many more beefy athletes.

His daughter had inherited his springy carriage and even the clean
pinkness of his complexion--always looking as though she were fresh from
her shower. But there was nothing mannish about Lou Grayling--nothing at
all, though she had other attributes of body and mind for which to thank
her father.

They were the best of chums. No father and daughter could have trod the
odd corners of the world these two had visited without becoming so
closely attached to each other that their processes of thought, as well
as their opinions in most matters, were almost in perfect harm