growing Western city, and embodied from the first homesick days an ideal
to which he hoped sometime permanently to return. But he never had. His
family had shown a perversity of taste in preferring the sea, and he had
perforce been content with a visit of a month or so every other summer,
accompanied usually by his daughter, Helen. On such occasions, he stayed
with his sister, Mrs. Whitely.

The Whitely mills were significant of the new Bremerton, now neither
village nor city, but partaking of the characteristics of both. French
Canadian might be heard on the main square as well as Yankee; and that
revolutionary vehicle, the automobile, had inspired there a great brick
edifice with a banner called the Bremerton House. Enterprising Italians
had monopolized the corners with fruit stores, and plate glass and
asphalt were in evidence. But the hills looked down unchanged, and in
the cool, maple-shaded streets, though dotted with modern residences,
were the same demure colonial houses he had known in boyhood.

He was met at the station by his sister, a large, matronly woman who
invariably set the world whizzing backward for Langmaid; so completely
did she typify the contentment, the point of view of an age gone by. For
life presented no more complicated problems to the middle-aged Mrs.
Whitely than it had to Alice Langmaid.

"I know what you've come for, Nelson," she said reproachfully, when she
greeted him at the station. "Dr. Gilman's dead, and you want our Mr.
Hodder. I feel it in my bones. Well, you can't get him. He's had ever
so many calls, but he won't leave Bremerton."

She knew perfectly well, however, that Nelson would get him, although her
brother characteristically did not at once acknowledge his mission.