“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 harmony.  Although Mrs. Euphemia Conroth was the professor’s own sister he could appreciate Lou’s attitude in this emergency.  While the girl was growing up there had been times when it was considered best—­usually because of her studies—­for Lou to live with Aunt Euphemia.  Indeed, that good lady believed it almost a sin that a young girl should attend the professor on any of his trips into “the wilds,” as she expressed it.  Aunt Euphemia ignored the fact that nowadays the railroad and telegraph are in Thibet and that turbines ply the headwaters of the Amazon.

Mrs. Conroth dwelt in Poughkeepsie—­that half-way stop between New York and Albany; and she was as exclusive and opinionated a lady as might be found in that city of aristocracy and learning.

The college in the shadow of which Aunt Euphemia’s dwelling basked, was that which had led the professor’s daughter under the lady’s sway.  Although the girls with whom Lou associated within the college walls were up-to-the-minute—­if not a little ahead of it—­she found her aunt, like many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in college towns, was really a fossil.  If one desires to meet the ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this stratum of humanity within stone’s throw of a college.  These barnacles like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their own school experiences, that went out of fashion inside the colleges thirty years ago.