husk of environment.

"That old house up the brook always seems so lonely,"
said Anne. "I never see visitors there. Of course,
its lane opens on the upper road--but I don't think
there's much coming and going. It seems odd we've
never met the Moores yet, when they live within fifteen
minutes' walk of us. I may have seen them in church,
of course, but if so I didn't know them. I'm sorry
they are so unsociable, when they are our only near
neighbors."

"Evidently they don't belong to the race that knows
Joseph," laughed Gilbert. "Have you ever found out
who that girl was whom you thought so beautiful?"

"No. Somehow I have never remembered to ask about her.
But I've never seen her anywhere, so I suppose she must
have been a stranger. Oh, the sun has just
vanished--and there's the light."

As the dusk deepened, the great beacon cut swathes of
light through it, sweeping in a circle over the fields
and the harbor, the sandbar and the gulf.

"I feel as if it might catch me and whisk me leagues
out to sea," said Anne, as one drenched them with
radiance; and she felt rather relieved when they got so
near the Point that they were inside the range of those
dazzling, recurrent flashes.