The ’Sconset ’bus was waiting and they took it.  Until two years ago no automobiles had been allowed on the island, but there had been the triumph of utility over the picturesque and quaint, and now one motored across the moor on smooth asphalt, in one-half the time that the trip had been made in the old days.

The Admiral did not like it.  He admitted that it was quicker.  “But we used to see the pheasants fly up from the bushes, and the ducks from the pools, and now they are gone before we can get our eyes on them.”

Becky was not in a captious mood.  The moor was before her, rising and falling in low unwooded hills, amber with dwarf goldenrod, red with the turning huckleberry, purple with drying grasses, green with a thousand lovely growing things still unpainted by the brush of autumn.  The color was almost unbelievably gorgeous.  Even the pools by the roadside were almost unbelievably blue, as if the water had been dyed with indigo, and above all was that incredible blue sky——!

Then out of the distance clear cut like cardboard the houses lifted themselves above the horizon, with the sea a wall to the right, and to the left, across the moor, the Sankaty lighthouse, white and red with the sun’s rays striking across it.

They entered the village between rows of pleasant informal residences, many of them closed until another season; they passed the tennis courts, and came to the post-office, with its flag flying.  The ’bus stopped, and they found Tristram waiting for them.

“Tristram” is an old name in Nantucket.  There was a Tristram among the nine men who had purchased the island from Thomas Mayhew in 1659 for “30 pounds current pay and two beaver hats.”  The present Tristram wore the name appropriately.  Fair-haired and tall, not young but towards the middle-years, strong with the strength of one who lives out-of-doors in all weathers, browned with the wind and sun, blue-eyed, he called no man master, and was the owner of his own small acres.

Like the Admiral, he gave himself up for two months of the year to the summer people.  If his association with them was a business rather than a social affair, it was, none the less, interesting.  The occupation of Nantucket by “off-islanders” was a matter of infinite speculation and amusement.  Into the serenity of his life came restless men and women who golfed and swam and rode and danced, who chafed when it rained, and complained of the fog, who seemed endlessly trying to get something out of life and who were endlessly bored, who wondered how Tristram could stand the solitudes and who pitied him.

Tristram knew that he did not need their pity.  He had a thousand things that they did not have.  He was never bored, and he was too busy to manufacture amusements.  There were always things happening on the island—­each day brought something different.

To-day, it was the winter gulls.  “They are coming down—­lots of them from the north,” he told the Admiral as they drove through the quaint settlement with its gray little houses, “the big ones——­”