He adored Becky, and resented her long sojourn in the South.  “I believe you love the Judge better than you do me,” he told her, as he turned to her in the taxi which took them from the train to the boat.

“I don’t love anybody better than I do you,” she said, and tucked her hand in his.

“What have they been doing to you?” he demanded; “you are as white as paper.”

“Well, it has been hot.”

“Of all the fool things to keep you down there in summer.  I am going to take you straight to ’Sconset to the Whistling Sally and keep you there for a month.”

“The Whistling Sally” was the Admiral’s refuge when he was tired of the world.  It was a gray little house set among other gray little houses across the island from Nantucket town.  It stood on top of the bluff and overlooked a sea which stretched straight to Spain.  It was called “The Whistling Sally” because a ship’s figure-head graced its front yard, the buxom half of a young woman who blew out her cheeks in a perpetual piping, and whose faded colors spoke eloquently of the storms which had buffeted her.

The Admiral, as has been indicated, had an imposing mansion in Nantucket town.  For two months in the summer he entertained his friends in all the glory of a Colonial background—­white pillars, spiral stairway, polished floors, Chinese Chippendale, lacquered cabinets, old china and oil portraits.  He gave dinners and played golf, he had a yacht and a motor boat, he danced when the spirit moved him, and was light on his feet in spite of his years.  He was adored by the ladies, lionized by everybody, and liked it.

But when the summer was over and September came, he went to Siasconset and reverted to the type of his ancestors.  He hobnobbed with the men and women who had been the friends and neighbors of his forbears.  He doffed his sophistication as he doffed his formal clothes.  He wore a slicker on wet days, and the rain dripped from his rubber hat.  He sat knee to knee with certain cronies around the town pump.  He made chowder after a famous recipe, and dug clams when the spirit moved him.

His housekeeper, Jane, adjourned from the town house to “The Whistling Sally” when Becky was there; at other times the Admiral did for himself, keeping the little cottage as neat as a pin, and cooking as if he were born to it.

It seemed to Becky that as the long low island rose from the sea, the burdens which she had carried for so long dropped from her.  There were the houses on the cliff, the glint of a gilded dome, and then, gray and blue and green the old town showed against the skyline, resolving itself presently into roofs, and church towers, and patches of trees, with long piers stretching out through shallow waters, boat-houses, fishing smacks, and at last a thin line of people waiting on the wharf.

The air was like wine.  The sky was blue with the deep sapphire which follows a wind-swept night.  There was not a hint of mist or fog.  Flocks of gulls rose and dipped and rose again, or rested unafraid on the wooden posts of the pier.