And it was summer in Windover. The scanty green carpet of the downs had unrolled to its full, making as much as possible of its meagre proportions, atoning in depth of color for what it lacked in breadth and length: if the cliffs and boulders were grayer for the green, the grass looked greener for the gray. The saxifrage had faded, but among the red-cupped moss the checkerberry shot up tender, reddish leaves, the white violets scented the swamps, and the famous wild roses of the Cape dashed the bayberry thickets with pink. The late apple blossoms had blushed and gone, but the leaf and the hidden fruit responded to the anxious attention of the unenthusiastic farmer who wrenched his living out of the reluctant granite soil. In front of the hotels the inevitable geraniums blazed scarlet in mathematical flower-beds; and the boarding-houses convalesced from housecleaning in striped white scrim curtains and freshly painted blue wooden pumps. The lemonade and candy stores of “the season” sprouted with the white clovers by the wayside; and the express cart of the summer boarder’s luggage blossomed with the lonely and uncomfortable hydrangea, bearing its lot in yellow jars on piazza steps. Windover Point wore a coquettish air of expectation, like a girl in her best dress who waits in a lane for an invisible admirer. Windover Harbor was alive and alert. The summer fleets were out; the spring fleets were in. Bayard could hear the drop of anchors now, in the night, through his open windows; and the soft, pleasant splash, the home-coming and home-yearning sound which wakened the summer people, only to lull them to sleep again with a sense of poetic pleasure in a picturesque and alien life, gave to the lonely preacher of the winter Windover the little start of anxiety and responsibility which assassinates rest. He thought:-- “Another crew in! Is it Job? Or Bob? Or Jean? Will they go to Trawl’s, or get home straight? I must be off at dawn to see to this.” On the little beach opposite Mrs. Granite’s cottage the sea sighed in the night to answer him; ebbing, it lapped the pebbles gently, as if it felt sorry for the preacher, who had not known Windover as long as it had; it inhaled and exhaled long, soft breaths, in rhythm with which his own began to grow deep and quiet; and the start from a dream of drowning in the undertow off Ragged Rock would tell him that he had slept. More often, of late, the rising tide had replied nervously; it was fitful and noisy; it panted and seemed to struggle for articulation: for the June sea was restless, and the spring gales had died hard. The tints of the harbor were still a little cool, but the woodland on the opposite shore held out an arm of rich, ripe leaf; and the careening sails warmed to the sunrise and the sunset in rose and ochre, violet and pearl, opening buds of the blossom of midsummer color that was close at hand.