There was also the gerardia, pale pink and shading into mauve.  He had brought a great bunch to “The Whistling Sally,” and had put it in a bowl of gray pottery.

When Becky saw the flowers, she knew whom to thank.  “Oh, Tristram,” she said, “you found them on the moor.”

Tristram, standing in the little front room of the Admiral’s cottage, seemed to tower to the ceiling.  “The Whistling Sally” from the outside had the look of a doll’s house, too small for human habitation.  Within it was unexpectedly commodious.  It had the shipshape air of belonging to a seafaring man.  The rooms were all on one floor.  There was the big front room, which served as a sitting-room and dining-room.  It had a table built out from the wall with high-backed benches on each side of it, and a rack for glasses overhead.  There was a window above the table which looked out towards the sea.  The walls were painted blue, and there was an old brick fireplace.  A model of a vessel from which the figure-head in the front yard had been taken was over the mantel, flanked by an old print or two of Nantucket in the past.  There were Windsor chairs and a winged chair; some pot-bellied silver twinkled in a corner cupboard.

The windows throughout were low and square and small-paned and white-curtained.  The day was cool, and there was a fire on the hearth.  The blaze and the pink flowers, and the white curtains gave to the little room an effect of brightness, although outside the early twilight was closing in.

Jane came in with her white apron and added another high light.  She kissed Becky.  “Did your grandfather tell you that Mr. Cope is coming over to have chowder?” she asked.

It would be impossible to describe Jane’s way of saying “chowder.”  It had no “r,” and she clipped it off at the end.  But it is the only way in the world, and the people who so pronounce it are usually the only people in the world who can make it.

“Who is Mr. Cope?” Becky asked.

Mr. Cope, it seemed, had a cottage across the road from the Admiral’s.  He leased it, and it was his first season at ’Sconset.  His sister had been with him only a week ago.  She had gone “off-shore,” but she was coming back.

“Is he young?” Becky asked.

“Well, he isn’t old,” said Jane, “and he’s an artist.”

Becky was not in the least interested in Mr. Cope, so she talked to Tristram until he had to go back to his farm and the cows that waited to be milked.  Then Becky went into her room, and took off her hat and coat and ran a comb through the bronze waves of her hair.  She did not change the straight serge frock in which she had travelled.  She went back into the front room and found that Mr. Cope had come.

He was not old.  That was at once apparent.  And he was not young.  He did not look in the least like an artist.  He seemed, rather, like a prosperous business man.  He wore a Norfolk suit, and his reddish hair was brushed straight back from his forehead.  He had rather humorous gray eyes, and Becky thought there was a look of delicacy about his white skin.  Later he spoke of having come for his health, and she learned that he had a weak heart.