Anthony was down-stairs.  He was a tall, perfectly turned out youth, and he greeted me in his perfect manner.

“Nancy is on the roof,” I told him, “and she wants you to come up.”

“So you are going to church?  Pray for me, Elizabeth.”

Yet I knew he felt that he did not need my prayers.  He had Nancy, more money than he could spend, and life was before him.  What more, he would ask, could the gods give?

I issued final instructions to my maids about the dinner and put on my hat.  It was a rather superlative hat and had come from Fifth Avenue.  I spend the spring and fall in New York and buy my clothes at the smartest places.  The ladies of Nantucket have never been provincial in their fashions.  Our ancestors shopped in the marts of the world.  When our captains sailed the seas they brought home to their womenfolk the treasures of loom and needle from Barcelona and Bordeaux, from Bombay and Calcutta, London and Paris and Tokio.

And perhaps because of my content in my new hat, perhaps because of the pleasant young pair of lovers which I had left behind me in the old house, perhaps because of the shade and sunshine, and the gardens, perhaps because of the bells, the world seemed more than ever good to me as I went on my way.

My pew in the church is well toward the middle.  My ancestors were modest, or perhaps they assumed that virtue.  They would have neither the highest nor the lowest seat in the synagogue.

It happens, therefore, that strangers who come usually sit in front of me.  I have a lively curiosity, and I like to look at them.  In the winter there are no strangers, and my mind is, I fancy, at such times, more receptive to the sermon.

I was early and sat almost alone in the great golden room whose restraint in decoration suggests the primitive bareness of early days.  Gradually people began to come in, and my attention was caught by the somewhat unusual appearance of a man who walked up the aisle preceded by the usher.

He was rather stocky as to build, but with good, square military shoulders and small hips.  He wore a blue reefer, white trousers, and carried a yachtsman’s cap.  His profile as he passed into his pew showed him young, his skin slightly bronzed, his features good, if a trifle heavy.

Yet as he sat down and I studied his head, what seemed most significant about him was his hair.  It was reddish-gold, thick, curled, and upstanding, like the hair on the head of a lovely child, or in the painting of a Titian or a Tintoretto.

In a way he seemed out of place.  Young men of his type so rarely came to church alone.  Indeed, they rarely came to church at all.  He seemed to belong to the out-of-doors—­to wide spaces.  I was puzzled, too, by a faint sense of having seen him before.

It was in the middle of the sermon that it all connected up.  Years ago a ship had sailed into the harbor, and I had been taken down to see it.  I had been enchanted by the freshly painted figurehead—­a strong young god of some old Norse tale, with red-gold hair and a bright blue tunic.  And now in the harbor was The Viking, and here, in the shadow of a perfectly orthodox pulpit, sat that strong young god, more glorious even than my memory of his wooden prototype.