“Perhaps this—­this half-uncle may be quite as trying.”

“Impossible!” was the father’s rather emphatic reply.

“What?” she cried.  “Traitor to the family fame?”

“You do not know Cape Cod folk.  I do,” he told her rather seriously.  “Some of them are quaint and peculiar.  I suppose there are just as many down there with traits of extreme Yankee frugality as elsewhere in New England.  But your mother’s people, as I knew them, were the very salt of the earth.  Our wanderings were all that kept you from knowing the old folk before they passed away.”

“You tempt me,” was all Louise said.  Then the conversation lapsed.

It was the day following that the professor was to go to Boston preparatory to sailing.  At the moment of departure his daughter, smiling, tucked a sealed note into his pocket.

“Don’t open it, daddy-prof, till you are out of sight of Cohasset Rocks,” she said.  “Then you will not know where I am going to spend the time of your absence until it is too late—­either to oppose or to advise.”

“You can’t worry me,” he told her, with admiration in his glance.  “I’ve every confidence in you, my dear.  Have a good time if you can.”

She watched him down the long platform between the trains.  When she saw him assisted into the Pullman by the porter she turned with a little sigh, and walked up the rise toward Forty-second Street.  She could almost wish she were going with him, although seaweed and mollusk gathering was a messy business, and the vessel he sailed in was an ancient converted coaster with few comforts for womenkind.  Louise Grayling had been hobbled by city life for nearly a year now and she began to crave new scenes.

There were some last things to do at the furnished apartment they were giving up.  Some trunks were to go to the storehouse.  Her own baggage was to be tagged and sent to the Fall River boat.

For, spurred by curiosity as well as urged by a desire to escape Aunt Euphemia for a season, Louise was bent upon a visit to Cape Cod.  At least, she would learn what manner of person her only other living relative was—­her mother’s half-brother, Captain Abram Silt.

In the train the next day, which wandered like an erratic caterpillar along the backbone of the Cape, she began to wonder if, after all, she was displaying that judgment which daddy-professor praised so highly.  It was too early in the season for the “millionaire’s special” to be scheduled, in which those wealthy summer folk who have “discovered” the Cape travel to and from Boston.  Lou was on a local from Fall River that stopped at every pair of bars and even hesitated at the pigpens along the right of way.

Getting aboard and getting off again at the innumerable little stations, were people whose like she had never before seen.  And their speech, plentifully sprinkled with colloquialisms of a salt flavor, amused her, and sometimes puzzled her.  Some of the men who rode short distances in the car wore fishermen’s boots and jerseys.  They called the conductor “skipper,” and hailed each other in familiar idioms.