Interested in skimming these wonderful stories, Lou Grayling spent most of the afternoon.  Here was a fund of entertainment for rainy days—­or wakeful nights, if she chanced to suffer such.  She carried one of the scrapbooks into her bedroom that it might be under her hand if she desired such amusement.

In arranging her possessions in closet and bureau, she found no time on this first day at Cap’n Abe’s store to stroll even as far as The Beaches; but the next morning she got up betimes, as soon as Cap’n Amazon himself was astir, dressed, and ran down and out of the open back door while her uncle was sweeping the store.

The sun was but then opening a red eye above the horizon.  The ocean, away out to this line demarcating sea and sky, was perfectly flat.  Unlike the previous dawn, this was as clear as a bell’s note.

Louise had been wise enough to wear high shoes, so the sands above high-water mark did not bother her.  The waves lapped in softly, spreading over the dimpling gray beach, their voice reduced to a whispering murmur.

Along the crescent of the sands, above on the bluffs, were set the homes of the summer residents—­those whom Gusty Durgin, the waitress at the hotel, termed “the big bugs.”  On the farthest point visible in this direction was a sprawling, ornate villa with private dock and boathouses, and a small breakwater behind which floated a fleet of small craft.  Louise heard the “put-put-a-put” of a motor and descried a swift craft coming from this anchorage.

She saw, by sweeping it with her glance, that not a soul but herself was on the shore—­neither in the direction of the summer colony nor on the other hand where the beach curved sharply out to the lighthouse at the end of the Neck.  The motor boat was fast approaching the spot where Louise stood.

It being the single moving object on the scene, save the gulls, she began to watch it.  There was but one person in the motor boat.  He was hatless and was dressed in soiled flannels.  It was the young man, Lawford Tapp, of whom Cap’n Abe did not altogether approve.

“He must work for those people over there,” Louise Grayling thought.  “He is nice looking.”

It could not be possible that Lawford Tapp had descried and recognized the figure of the girl from the Tapp anchorage!

He no longer wore his hip boots.  After shutting off his engine, he guided the sharp prow of the launch right up into the sand and leaped into shallow water, bringing ashore the bight of the painter to throw over a stub sunk above high-water mark.

“Good-morning!  What do you think of it?” he asked Louise, with a cordial smile that belonged to him.

“It is lovely!” she said.  “Really wonderful!  I suppose you have lived here so long it does not appeal to you as strongly as to the new-beholder?”

“I don’t know about that.  It’s the finest place in the world; I think.  There’s no prettier shore along the Atlantic coast than The Beaches.”