Tommy Lupton was a great, tall, strapping youth with everything indeterminate about him, from the colour of his hair and eyes to his behaviour. He had no visible ambitions beyond becoming a bayman like his father and ultimately a surfman in one of the Coast Guard Stations on the beach, preferably the one at Lone Cove where John Smiley was keeper and his father a member of the crew. Since the day, some years earlier, when Guy Vanton had thrown Tommy around in a pine-needled clearing in the woods about Blue Port, Tommy and Guy had been good friends, so far as too utterly unlike young men can be fast friends. Neither fully understood the other. Mermaid, who liked them both, had constantly to be explaining Guy to Tommy and interpreting Tommy to Guy.

“Tommy likes you but thinks he ought not to,” she told Guy. “Tommy is the sort of boy that thinks he ought not to like anybody unless he can admire him, too. If Tommy’s best friend were running against—oh, well, say Colonel Roosevelt—for some office, Tommy would vote for Roosevelt. You see, he’d admire Roosevelt.”

“It’s a principle,” elucidated Guy.

“It’s unreasonable,” elucidated Mermaid.

[155]“It is better than just voting for a man because he’s a friend of yours.”

“Of course. But to have to admire a person in order to like him comfortably is just like—like a boy!” exclaimed the young lady. “Like a little boy,” she added.

To the hero-worshipping Tommy she had something else to say.

“You’ll never see how much there is in Guy Vanton if you keep looking for what isn’t there,” she admonished him. Tommy looked at her, cloudily.

“I suppose it takes a girl to see what there is in him,” he surmised, jealously. “You—I don’t suppose Guy sees anything in me. I guess you don’t, either. I guess there isn’t anything much in me,” went on poor young Mr. Lupton, pathetically. “I sha’n’t ever amount to a lot. I’ve never been anywhere, and I can’t jabber French, and I never wrote poetry except on a valentine. I hate school and I’m glad I’m through with it. And I’d rather be a Coast Guard than write a book, as Guy’s doing, or become a great chemical engineer, as you say Dickie may some day. I’ll never be rich and I’ll never be famous, and you can’t make me either.”

Mermaid was building things in the sand. She brushed her hands and looked at him with a smile.

“I don’t want to make you anything, Tommy,” she said. “Go on and be a Coast Guard. My Dad’s a[156] Coast Guard. Your father’s a Coast Guard. Being a Coast Guard is just as good as anything else and better than most. It all depends upon the man.”

“Well, I’m a man,” avowed Mr. Lupton. “And, anyway, you say that now, but after you’ve been away at school and all that you’ll look down on me. You won’t want anything to do with me, much. You won’t want me around. And I won’t be around,” he concluded. Mermaid looked at him, briefly, and then glanced away. A slight uneasiness beset her. It was justified when Tommy suddenly reached over for her hand, taking it roughly.

“Mermaid,” he said. He stopped, and then went on, stammering a little: “You—you must know I love you—like everything,” he finished, helplessly. “You—of course I can’t expect you feel the same way——”

Mermaid, much disturbed, cut in: “No, I don’t, Tommy.”

“You oughtn’t to interrupt like that.” Mr. Lupton&r............