"Joe dunno. Cal'late that's why he came all this way with it. He'll find out what's in that letter if he can. Then the hul town'll know. I told him to tell Achsy I'd drop over soon's my pies are out of the oven. Better set down a spell and go along with me." But Tillie Higgins, with regret in her voice, explained that she had bread in her own oven. "If it's news send Martie over with it. Hope it's nothing bothersome. Achsy Green has 'nough as 'tis." This Sunset Lane was the farthest byway of the northernmost habitation of Cape Cod. Only a ridge of sandy dunes at its back door kept it from tumbling into the blue Atlantic. Provincetown folk called it "up p'int way" and "t'other end." The more fanciful name had been given to it by a young Portuguese who had essayed to convert that corner of Provincetown into a summer colony. He had only succeeded, after long effort, in selling the Carpenter house nearest Commercial Street, then had abandoned his enterprise to open a combination garage and one-arm lunch room on Commercial Street. Sunset Lane led nowhere, unless one counted the dunes; it was only wide enough for a cart to pass between the hedging rows of crowding wild flowers and the guardian willows; it was deep in sand. The rising tide of commercialism that was destroying the eighteenth-century dignity of the little town turned before it reached it. Few went there unless on definite purpose bound, excepting the artists who came singly and in groups to paint an old gray gable against an overtowering hill of sand or a scrap of blue sky between crumbling chimney pots and peaked roofs or old Mrs. Calkins' hollyhocks that flanked the narrow byway like gaudy soldiers. Some sketched Jeremiah Higgins' octagonal house, more of an oddity than a thing of grace yet ornamented with hand-wrought cornices and dignified by a figurehead from the prow of a ship long since split into driftwood; others went on to the end of the lane to catch upon their canvases the grace of Achsa's Green's old gray-shingled cottage with its low roof and white pilastered doorway. With the changing years Achsa Green had become as quaint as her surroundings. Bent, and small, her face seared to the brown of a withered leaf from the hot suns and biting winds, her hands knotted with labor, her sparse hair twisted into a knob at the exact center of the back of her head, she was not lovely to look upon, yet from her eyes gleamed a spirit that knew no wear of age, that took its knocks upstanding, that suffered when others suffered but that spread a healing philosophy of God's wisdom. For Achsa's acceptance of God's wisdom faltered only when she thought of Lavender.