visit a whiff, sharp and strong, from the wild outer world.  A week later, sea-hammered and bar-bound for that time, had arrived the revenue cutter Bear, and there had been a column of conjecture in the local paper, hints of a heavy landing of opium and of a vain quest for the mysterious schooner Halcyon.  Only Fred and his mother, and the several house Indians, knew of the stiffened horse in the barn and of the devious way it was afterward smuggled back to the fishing village on the beach.

Despite those twenty years, it was the same old Tom Travers that alighted from the Pullman.  To his brother’s eyes, he did not look sick.  Older he was of course.  The Panama hat did not hide the grey hair, and though indefinably hinting of shrunkenness, the broad shoulders were still broad and erect.  As for the young woman with him, Frederick Travers experienced an immediate shock of distaste.  He felt it vitally, yet vaguely.  It was a challenge and a mock, yet he could not name nor place the source of it.  It might have been the dress, of tailored linen and foreign cut, the shirtwaist, with its daring stripe, the black wilfulness of the hair, or the flaunt of poppies on the large straw hat or it might have been the flash and colour of her—­the black eyes and brows, the flame of rose in the cheeks, the white of the even teeth that showed too readily.  “A spoiled child,” was his thought, but he had no time to analyse, for his brother’s hand was in his and he was making his niece’s acquaintance.

There it was again.  She flashed and talked like her colour, and she talked with her hands as well.  He could not avoid noting the smallness of them.  They were absurdly small, and his eyes went to her feet to make the same discovery.  Quite oblivious of the curious crowd on the station platform, she had intercepted his attempt to lead to the motor car and had ranged the brothers side by side.  Tom had been laughingly acquiescent, but his younger brother was ill at ease, too conscious of the many eyes of his townspeople.  He knew only the old Puritan way.  Family displays were for the privacy of the family, not for the public.  He was glad she had not attempted to kiss him.  It was remarkable she had not.  Already he apprehended anything of her.

She embraced them and penetrated them with sun-warm eyes that seemed to see through them, and over them, and all about them.

“You’re really brothers,” she cried, her hands flashing with her eyes.  “Anybody can see it.  And yet there is a difference—­I don’t know.  I can’t explain.”

In truth, with a tact that exceeded Frederick Travers’ farthest disciplined forbearance, she did not dare explain.  Her wide artist-eyes had seen and sensed the whole trenchant and essential difference.  Alike they looked, of the unmistakable same stock, their features reminiscent of a common origin; and there resemblance ceased.  Tom was three inches taller, and well-greyed was the long, Viking moustache.