He seemed to be absolutely at home—­sat and stood at the right places, sang the hymns in a delightful barytone which was not loud, but which sounded a clear note above the feebler efforts of the rest of us.

It has always been my custom to welcome the strangers within our gates, and I must confess to a preference for those who seem to promise something more than a perfunctory interchange.

So as my young viking came down the aisle, I held out my hand.  “We are so glad to have you with us.”

He stopped at once, gave me his hand, and bent on me his clear gaze.  “Thank you.”  And then, immediately:  “You live here?  In Nantucket?”

“Yes.”

“All the year round?”

“Practically.”

“That is very interesting.”  Again his clear gaze appraised me.  “May I walk a little way with you?  I have no friends here, and I want to ask a lot of questions about the island.”

The thing which struck me most as we talked was his utter lack of self-consciousness.  He gave himself to the subject in hand as if it were a vital matter, and as if he swept all else aside.  It is a quality possessed by few New Englanders; it is, indeed, a quality possessed by few Americans.  So when he offered to walk with me, it seemed perfectly natural that I should let him.  Not one man in a thousand could have made such a proposition without an immediate erection on my part of the barriers of conventionality.  To have erected any barrier in this instance would have been an insult, to my perception of the kind of man with whom I had to deal.

He was a gentleman, individual, and very much in earnest; and more than all, he was immensely attractive.  There was charm in that clear blue gaze of innocence.  Yet it was innocence plus knowledge, plus something which as yet I could not analyze.

He left me at my doorstep.  I found that he had come to the island not to play around for the summer at the country clubs and on the bathing beach, but to live in the past—­see it as it had once been—­when its men went down to the sea in ships.  And because there was still so much that we had to say to each other, I asked him to have a cup of tea with me, “this afternoon at four.”

He accepted at once, with his air of sweeping aside everything but the matter in hand.  I entered the house with a sense upon me of high adventure.  I could not know that I was playing fate, changing in that moment the course of Nancy’s future.

* * * * *

Dinner was at one o’clock.  It seems an impossible hour to people who always dine at night.  But on the Sabbath we Nantucketers eat our principal meal when we come home from church.

Nancy and Anthony protested as usual.  “Of course you can’t expect us to dress.”