"More ride!" she commanded, waving her hands and clucking her tongue as
he had just taught her to do.

"Don't let her worry you, Mr. Darcy," called Mrs. Triplett from the
kitchen. "Her mother will be back from the post-office most any minute
now. Just send her out here to me if she gets too bothersome."

Instantly Georgina cuddled her head down against his shoulder. She had no
mind to be separated from this new-found playfellow. When he produced a
battered silver watch from the pocket of his velveteen waistcoat, holding
it over her ear, she was charmed into a prolonged silence. The clack of
Tippy's spoon against the crock came in from the kitchen, and now and
then the fire snapped or the green fore-log made a sing-song hissing.

More than thirty years had passed by since the old Towncrier first
visited the Huntingdon home. He was not the Towncrier then, but a
seafaring man who had sailed many times around the globe, and had his
fill of adventure. Tired at last of such a roving life, he had found
anchorage to his liking in this quaint old fishing town at the tip end of
Cape Cod. Georgina's grandfather, George Justin Huntingdon, a judge and a
writer of dry law books, had been one of the first to open his home to
him. They had been great friends, and little Justin, now Georgina's
father, had been a still closer friend. Many a day they had spent
together, these two, fishing or blueberrying or tramping across the
dunes. The boy called him "Uncle Darcy," tagging after him like a shadow,
and feeling a kinship in their mutual love of adventure which drew as
strongly as family ties. The Judge always said that it was the old
sailor's yarns of sea life which sent Justin into the navy "instead of
the law office where he belonged."