"Flint, you are a misanthrope! You have searched out this God-forsaken stretch of sand just for the purpose of getting away from your kind. Now I have hunted you to your lair, and I propose to stay with you for a fortnight; but I am not to be dragooned into saying that I think your resort is a scene of beauty, for I don't; but that is a jolly, old, gray, tumbled-down building over there--a barn, I suppose." "No, sir; that is the Nepaug Inn. As it has neither porters, waiters, nor electric bells, you are expected to shoulder your own luggage and march upstairs--second room to the right. Whoa, there!" he called out to the old horse a full minute after the animal had come to a dead halt in front of the inn door. The noise, however, served its purpose in bringing Marsden to the door, and loading the old inn-keeper with imprecations for their unlucky experience with the molasses, Flint left him to struggle with the contents of the wagon, while he himself escorted Brady up the narrow, sagging stairs, and ensconced him in a room next his own,--a room whose windows looked out like his over the purple stretch of ocean, now opalescent with reflection of the clouds. "Where do you take your bath?" Brady asked, looking round somewhat helplessly. "In there, you land-lubber!" answered Flint, pointing out to sea; "isn't the tub big enough?" Brady laughed, a hearty, boyish, infectious laugh. "All right," he said, "only it seems rather odd to come East for pioneering. Did you know, by the way, that I am to be in New York this winter?" "No!" "Yes. Our house is just establishing a branch office there, and I am to be at the head of it." Flint chuckled. "Bison establishing a branch office in New York! The humor of the thing delights me." "I don't see anything so very funny about it," answered Brady, rather testily; "but I have no stomach for a quarrel till I have had some supper--unless you sup _out there_," he added with a lordly wave of his hand towards the ocean in imitation of Flint's gesture. "I hope, at any rate, our evening meal is not to be of farina. The associations might be a little too strong even for my appetite." CHAPTER IV THE DAVITTS "The short and simple annals of the poor." After taking leave of Flint and his companion in misfortune, Winifred quickened her pace. The lengthening shadows warned her that if she intended to return to the White House before supper was over, she had no time to lose. "Come, Paddy!" she said, laying her hand with a light, caressing gesture on the shaggy red-brown head of the Irish setter, which had kept closer guard than ever since the meeting with the strangers in the road,--"come, Paddy! we must make a sprint for it."