He had a pleasant laughing voice.  He belonged to Boston, but had lived abroad for years.

“With nothing to show for it,” he told her with a shrug, “but one portrait.  I painted my sister, and she kept that.  But before we left Paris we burned the rest——­”

“Oh, how dreadful,” Becky cried.

“No, it wasn’t dreadful.  They were not worth keeping.  You see, I played a lot and made sketches and things, and then there was the war—­and I wasn’t very well.”

He had had two years of aviation, and after that a desk in the War Department.

“And now I am painting again.”

“Gardens?” Becky asked, “or the sea?”

“Neither.  I am trying to paint the moor.  I’ll show you in the morning.”

The Admiral was in the kitchen, superintending the chowder.  Jane knew how to make it, and he knew that she knew.  But he always went into the kitchen at the psychological moment, tied on an apron, and put in the pilot crackers.  Then he brought the chowder in, in a big porcelain tureen which was shaped like a goose.  Becky loved him in his white apron, with his round red face, and the porcelain goose held high.

“If you could paint him like that,” she suggested to Archibald Cope.

“Do you think he would let me?” eagerly.

After supper the two men smoked by the fire, and Becky sat between them and watched the blaze.  She heard very little of the conversation.  Her mind was in Albemarle.  How far away it seemed!  Just three nights ago she had danced at the Merriweathers’ ball, and George had held her hand as she leaned over the balcony.

“If you can bring yourself back for a moment, Becky, to present company,” her grandfather was saying, “you can tell Mr. Cope whether you will walk with us to-morrow to Tom Never’s.”

“I’d love it.”

“Really?” Cope asked.  “You are sure you won’t be too tired?”

“Not in this air.  I feel as if I could walk forever.”

“How about a bit of a walk to-night—­up to the bluff?  Is it too late, Admiral?”

“Not for you two.  I’ll finish my pipe, and read my papers.”

The young people followed the line of the bluff until they came to an open space which looked towards the east.  To the left of them was the ridge with a young moon hanging low above it, and straight ahead, brighter than the moon, whitening the heavens, stretching out and out until it reached the sailors in their ships, was the Sankaty light.

“I always come out to look at it before I go to bed,” said Cope; “it is such a living thing, isn’t it?”

The wind was rising and they could hear the sound of the sea.  Becky caught her breath.  “On dark nights I like to think how it must look to the ships beyond the shoals——­”

“The sea is cruel,” said Cope; “that’s why I don’t paint it.”

“Oh, it isn’t always cruel.”

“When isn’t it?  Last year, with the submarines, it was—­a monster.  I saw a picture once in a gallery, ‘The Eternal Siren,’ just the sea.  And a woman asked, ‘Where’s the Siren?’”