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I can’t in the least describe to you how he said it. There was a tenseness, almost a fierceness, in his brilliant blue eyes. Yet he finished up with a little laugh. “You see,” he said, “I am a sort of Flying Dutchman–sailing the seas eternally, driven not by any sinister force but by my own delight in it.”

“Do you go alone?”

“Oh, I have guests–at times. But I am often my own–good company–“

He stopped and rose. Nancy had appeared in the doorway. She crossed the porch and came down toward us. She was in her bathing suit and cap, gray again, with a line of green on the edges, and flung over her shoulders was a gray cloak. She was on her way to the stables–it was before the day of motor-cars on the island, those halcyon, heavenly days. The door was open and her horse harnessed and waiting for her. She could not, of course, pass us without speaking, and so I presented Olaf.

Anita had brought the tea, and Nancy stayed to eat a slice of thin bread and butter. “In this air one is always hungry,” she said to Olaf, and smiled at him.

He did not smile back. He was surveying her with a sort of frowning intensity. She spoke of it afterward, “Does he always stare like that?” But I think that, in a way, she was pleased.

She drove her own horse, wrapped in her cloak and with an utter disregard to the informality of her attire. She would, I knew, gather up the Drakes and Bob Needham, likewise attired in bathing costumes, and they would all have tea on the other side of the island, naiad-like and utterly unconcerned. I did not approve of it, but Nancy did not cut her life to fit my pattern.

When she had gone, Olaf said to me, abruptly, “Why does she wear gray?”

“Oh, she has worked out a theory that repression in color is an evidence of advanced civilization. The Japanese, for example–“

“Why should civilization advance? It has gone far enough–too far–And she should wear a blue cloak–sea-blue–the color of her eyes–“

“And of yours.” I smiled at him.

“Yes. Are they like hers?”

They were almost uncannily alike. I had noticed it when I saw them together. But there the resemblance stopped.

“She belongs to the island?”

“She lives in New York. But every drop of blood in her is seafaring blood.”

“Good!” He sat for a moment in silence, then spoke of something else. But when he was ready to go, he included Nancy in an invitation. “If you and Miss Greer could lunch with me to-morrow on my yacht–“

I was not sure about Nancy’s engagements, but I thought we might. “You can call us up in the morning.”

Nancy brought the Drakes and Bob Needham back with her for supper, and Mimi Sears was with Anthony. Supper on Sunday is an informal meal–everything on the table and the servants out.

Nancy, clothed in something white and exquisite, served the salad. “So your young viking didn’t stay, Elizabeth?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

It was then that she spoke of his frowning gaze. “Does he always stare like that?”

Anthony, breaking in, demanded, “Did he stare at Nancy?”

I nodded. “It was her eyes.”

They all looked at me. “Her eyes?”

“Yes. He said that her cloak should have matched them.”

Anthony flushed. He has a rather captious code for outsiders. Evidently Olaf had transgressed it.

“Is the man a dressmaker?”

“Of course not, Anthony.”

“Then why should he talk of Nancy’s clothes?”

“Well,” Nancy remarked, “perhaps the less said about my clothes the better. I was in my bathing suit.”

Anthony was irritable. “Well, why not? You had a right to wear what you pleased, but he did not have a right to make remarks about it.”

I came to Olaf’s defense. “You would understand better if you could see him. He is rather different, Anthony.”

“I don’t like different people,” and in that sentence was a summary of Anthony’s prejudices. He and Nancy mingled with their own kind. Anthony’s friends were the men who had gone to the right schools, who lived in the right streets, belonged to the right clubs, and knew the right people. Within those limits, humanity might do as it pleased; without them, it was negligible, and not to be considered.