“If there were only a French fleet in the harbor, dear,” said Margaret one day, “I should feel that I had quite taken up the life of my great-great-grandmother.”

They were sailing in Hollowell’s yacht, in which Uncle Jerry had brought his family round from New York.  He hated the water, but Mrs. Hollowell and the children doted on the sea, he said.

“Wouldn’t the torpedo station make up for it?” Henderson asked.

“Hardly.  But it shows the change of a hundred years.  Only, isn’t it odd, this personal dropping back into an old situation?  I wonder what she was like?”

“The accounts say she was the belle of Newport.  I suppose Newport has a belle once in a hundred years.  The time has come round.  But I confess I don’t miss the French fleet,” replied Henderson, with a look of love that thrilled Margaret through and through.

“But you would have been an officer on the fleet, and I should have fallen in love with you.  Ah, well, it is better as it is.”

And it was better.  The days went by without a cloud.  Even after Henderson had gone, the prosperity of life filled her heart more and more.

“She might have been like me,” Carmen said to herself, “if she had only started right; but it is so hard to get rid of a New England conscience.”

When Margaret stayed in her room, one morning, to write a long-postponed letter to her aunt, she discovered that she had very little to write, at least that she wanted to write, to her aunt.  She began, however, resolutely with a little account of her life.  But it seemed another thing on paper, addressed to the loving eyes at Brandon.  There were too much luxury and idleness and triviality in it, too much Carmen and Count Crispo and flirtation and dissipation in it.

She tore it up, and went to the window and looked out upon the sea.  She was indignant with the Brandon people that they should care so little about this charming life.  She was indignant at herself that she had torn up the letter.  What had she done that anybody should criticise her?  Why shouldn’t she live her life, and not be hampered everlastingly by comparisons?

She sat down again, and took up her pen.  Was she changing—­was she changed?  Why was it that she had felt a little relief when her last Brandon visit was at an end, a certain freedom in Lenox and a greater freedom in Newport?  The old associations became strong again in her mind, the life in the little neighborhood, the simplicity of it, the high ideals of it, the daily love and tenderness.  Her aunt was no doubt wondering now that she did not write, and perhaps grieving that Margaret no more felt at home in Brandon.  It was too much.  She loved them, she loved them all dearly.  She would write that, and speak only generally of her frivolous, happy summer.  And she began, but somehow the letter seemed stiff and to lack the old confiding tone.