BREAKERS AHEAD

The summer-home of Max Feilding, Esq., of Walnut Hill, and of the beautiful and accomplished widow of the dead Frenchman was located on a levelled sand-dune in full view of the sea.  Indeed, from beneath its low-hooded porticos and piazzas nothing else could be seen except, perhaps, the wide sky—­gray, mottled, or intensely blue, as the weather permitted—­the stretch of white sand shaded from dry to wet and edged with tufts of yellow grass; the circling gulls and the tall finger of Barnegat Light pointing skyward.  Nothing, really, but some scattering buildings in silhouette against the glare of the blinding light—­one the old House of Refuge, a mile away to the north, and nearer by, the new Life Saving Station (now complete) in charge of Captain Nat Holt and his crew of trusty surfmen.

This view Lucy always enjoyed.  She would sit for hours under her awnings and watch the lazy boats crawling in and out of the inlet, or the motionless steamers—­motionless at that distance—­slowly unwinding their threads of smoke.  The Station particularly interested her.  Somehow she felt a certain satisfaction in knowing that Archie was at work and that he had at last found his level among his own people—­not that she wished him any harm; she only wanted him out of her way.

The hostelry itself was one of those low-roofed, shingle-sided and shingle-covered buildings common in the earlier days along the Jersey coast, and now supplanted by more modern and more costly structures.  It had grown from a farm-house and out-buildings to its present state with the help of an architect and a jig-saw; the former utilizing what remained of the house and its barns, and the latter transforming plain pine into open work patterns with which to decorate its gable ends and facade.  When the flags were raised, the hanging baskets suspended in each loop of the porches, and the merciless, omnipresent and ever-insistent sand was swept from its wide piazzas and sun-warped steps it gave out an air of gayety so plausible and enticing that many otherwise sane and intelligent people at once closed their comfortable homes and entered their names in its register.

The amusements of these habitues—­if they could be called habitues, this being their first summer—­ were as varied as their tastes.  There was a band which played mornings and afternoons in an unpainted pine pagoda planted on a plot of slowly dying grass and decorated with more hanging baskets and Chinese lanterns; there was bathing at eleven and four; and there was croquet on the square of cement fenced about by poles and clothes-lines at all hours.  Besides all this there were driving parties to the villages nearby; dancing parties at night with the band in the large room playing away for dear life, with all the guests except the very young and very old tucked away in twos in the dark corners of the piazzas out of reach of the lights and the inquisitive —­in short, all the diversions known to such retreats, so necessary for warding off ennui and thus inducing the inmates to stay the full length of their commitments.