bluff. I had gone perhaps a hundred yards when I heard a shrill voice
behind me. Turning, I saw Dorinda standing by the corner of the kitchen,
dust cloth in hand. Her husband was raking for dear life.

I walked on. The morning was a beautiful one. Beside the path, on the
landward side, the bayberry and beach-plum bushes were in bud, the green
of the new grass was showing above the dead brown of the old, a bluebird
was swaying on the stump of a wild cherry tree, and the pines and scrub
oaks of the grove by the Shore Lane were bright, vivid splashes of color
against the blue of the sky. At my right hand the yellow sand of the
bluff broke sharply down to the white beach and the waters of the
bay, now beginning to ebb. Across the bay the lighthouse at Crow Point
glistened with new paint and I could see a moving black speck, which I
knew was Ben Small, the keeper, busy whitewashing the fence beside
it. Down on the beach Zeb Kendrick was overhauling his dory. In the
distance, beyond the grove, I could hear the carpenters' hammers on the
roof of the big Atwater mansion, which was now the property of James
Colton, the New York millionaire, whose rumored coming to Denboro to
live had filled the columns of the country weekly for three months. The
quahaug boats were anchored just inside the Point; a clam digger was
wading along the outer edge of the sedge; a lobsterman was hauling his
pots in the channel; even the bluebird on the wild cherry stump had
a straw in his beak and was plainly in the midst of nest building.
Everyone had something to do and was doing it--everyone except Lute
Rogers and myself, the "birds of a feather." And even Lute was working
now, under compulsion.

Ordinarily the sight of all this industry would not have affected me. I
had seen it all before, or something like it. The six years I had spent
in Denboro, the six everlasting, idle, monotonous years, had had their