“This is—­enchanting—­” said Olaf.  He did not sit down at once.  He stood looking about him, at the sun-dial, and the whale’s jaw lying bleached on a granite pedestal, and at the fine old houses rising up around us.  “It is enchanting.  Do you know, I have been thinking myself very fortunate since you spoke to me in church this morning.”

After that it was all very easy.  He asked and I answered.  “You see,” he explained, finally, “I am hungry for anything that tells me about the sea.  Three generations back we were all sailors—­my great-grandfather and his fathers before him in Norway—­and far back of that—­the vikings.”  He drew a long breath.  “Then my grandfather came to America.  He settled in the West—­in Dakota, and planted grain.  He made money, but he was a thousand miles away from the sea.  He starved for it, but he wanted money, and, as I have said, he made it.  And my father made more money.  Then I came.  The money took me to school in the East—­to college.  My mother died and my father.  And now the money is my own.  I bought a yacht, and I have lived on the water.  I can’t get enough of it.  I think that I am making up for all that my father and my grandfather denied themselves.”

I can’t in the least describe to you how he said it.  There was a tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes.  Yet he finished up with a little laugh.  “You see,” he said, “I am a sort of Flying Dutchman—­sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister force but by my own delight in it.”

“Do you go alone?”

“Oh, I have guests—­at times.  But I am often my own—­good company—­”

He stopped and rose.  Nancy had appeared in the doorway.  She crossed the porch and came down toward us.  She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders was a gray cloak.  She was on her way to the stables—­it was before the day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days.  The door was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her.  She could not, of course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.

Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread and butter.  “In this air one is always hungry,” she said to Olaf, and smiled at him.

He did not smile back.  He was surveying her with a sort of frowning intensity.  She spoke of it afterward, “Does he always stare like that?” But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.

She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter disregard to the informality of her attire.  She would, I knew, gather up the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and utterly unconcerned.  I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her life to fit my pattern.

When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, “Why does she wear gray?”