sary in the scheme of things--to round out
the symmetry of it all. . . . I suppose you're dying to dangle those
flies in Brier Water to see whether there are any trout there. Well,
there are; Austin stocked it years ago, and he never fishes, so no doubt
it's full of fish. . . . What is that black thing moving along the edge
of the Golden Marsh?"

"A mink," he said, looking.

She seated herself cross-legged on the hill-top to watch the mink at her
leisure. But the lithe furry creature took to the water, dived, and
vanished, and she turned her attention to the landscape.

"Do you see that lighthouse far to the south?" she asked; "that is
Frigate Light. West of it lies Surf Point, and the bay between is Surf
Bay. That's where I nearly froze solid in my first ocean bath of the
year. A little later we can bathe in that cove to the north--the Bay of
Shoals. You see it, don't you?--there, lying tucked in between Wonder
Head and the Hither Woods; but I forgot! Of course you've been here
before; and you know all this; don't you?"

"Yes," he said quietly, "my brother and I came here as boys."

"Have you not been here since?"

"Once." He turned and looked down at the sea-battered wharf jutting into
the Bay of Shoals. "Once, since I was a boy," he repeated; "but I came
alone. The transports landed at that wharf after the Spanish war. The
hospital camp was yonder. . . . My brother died there."

She lifted her clear eyes to his; he was staring at the outline of the
Hither Woods fringing the ochre-tinted heights.

"There was no companion like him," he said; "there is no one to take his
place. Still, time helps--in a measure."

But he looked out across the sea with a grief for ever new.

She, too, had been helped by time; she was very young when the distant
and fabled seas took father and mother; and it was not entirely their
memory, but more the wistful lack of ability to remember that left her
so hopelessly alone.

Sharper his sorrow; but there was the comfort of recollection in it; and
she looked at him and, for an instant, envied him his keener grief. Then
leaning a little toward him where he reclined, the weight of his body
propped up on one arm, she laid her hand across his hand half buried in
the grass.

"It's only another tie between us," she said--"the memory of your dead
and mine. . . . Will you tell me about him?"

And leaning there, eyes on the sea, and her smooth, young hand covering
his, he told her of the