“O, will you please excuse me?” said she, blushing.  “I ought to have known better; but you showed us round so willing, and I never thought of your not living here.  I didn’t mean to be rude.”

“Of course you did not, and you were not.  I am very glad you said it, and glad you like me,” said Kate; and just then the party called the girl, and she hurried away, and I joined Kate.  “Then you heard it all.  That was worth having!” said she.  “She was such an honest little soul, and I mean to look for her when I get home.”

Sometimes we used to go out to the Light early in the morning with the fishermen who went that way to the fishing-grounds, but we usually made the voyage early in the afternoon if it were not too hot, and we went fishing off the rocks or sat in the house with Mrs. Kew, who often related some of her Vermont experiences, or Mr. Kew would tell us surprising sea-stories and ghost-stories like a story-book sailor.  Then we would have an unreasonably good supper and afterward climb the ladder to the lantern to see the lamps lighted, and sit there for a while watching the ships and the sunset.  Almost all the coasters came in sight of Deephaven, and the sea outside the light was their grand highway.  Twice from the lighthouse we saw a yacht squadron like a flock of great white birds.  As for the sunsets, it used to seem often as if we were near the heart of them, for the sea all around us caught the color of the clouds, and though the glory was wonderful, I remember best one still evening when there was a bank of heavy gray clouds in the west shutting down like a curtain, and the sea was silver-colored.  You could look under and beyond the curtain of clouds into the palest, clearest yellow sky.  There was a little black boat in the distance drifting slowly, climbing one white wave after another, as if it were bound out into that other world beyond.  But presently the sun came from behind the clouds, and the dazzling golden light changed the look of everything, and it was the time then to say one thought it a beautiful sunset; while before one could only keep very still, and watch the boat, and wonder if heaven would not be somehow like that far, faint color, which was neither sea nor sky.

When we came down from the lighthouse and it grew late, we would beg for an hour or two longer on the water, and row away in the twilight far out from land, where, with our faces turned from the Light, it seemed as if we were alone, and the sea shoreless; and as the darkness closed round us softly, we watched the stars come out, and were always glad to see Kate’s star and my star, which we had chosen when we were children.  I used long ago to be sure of one thing,—­that, however far away heaven might be, it could not be out of sight of the stars.  Sometimes in the evening we waited out at sea for the moonrise, and then we would take the oars again and go slowly in, once in a while singing or talking, but oftenest silent.