With the Cape standards of wealth it would not have made any difference to Achsa Green, anyway, or to anyone else, if they had known that the "nice-appearin' boy" in the old flannels was the only son of Roderick Allan, President of the Allan Iron Works of Newark, New Jersey. Not half so much difference as the old flannels made to Dugald's mother. The inclination on the part of their boy to be "queer," for under that head they put all his predilections that differed from their ambitions--distressed his parents very much. The boy had "everything" and he didn't care a rap about "anything"; they looked upon his spells of dreamy preoccupation as "loafing." His father had an executive office in the iron works waiting for him when he finished college, a job at which any red-blooded young fellow would jump, and Dugald talked of painting. His mother had grieved that he would take no part in the social whirl that made up her existence, that he laughed at the creed of her "set," scouted the class commandments by which she lived. When he expressed the intention of going on a tramp over Cape Cod she had encouraged the whim. She had believed that the discomforts of such an expedition would cure him of his "notions." She had motored to Provincetown two summers before and she thought it a forlorn place; the hotels were impossible, the streets dusty and crowded, everything smelled fishy and one was always elbowing great foreign creatures in dirty oilskins and rubber boots. Like many a mother she had been too busy living down to her rapidly accruing wealth to know the man her boy had grown to be. All her upbringing notwithstanding he was a simple soul with a sympathetic understanding of his fellow mortals; a quiet humor and a keen perception of beauty that abhorred the false or superficial, a brain that stifled in crowded places. He much preferred knocking elbows with men of homely labor to the crowded and law-breaking parties he came to Cape Cod to escape; he found among the fisherfolk, the old gray wharves, the sandy dunes, everlastingly swept with the clean breath of the Atlantic, a peace of mind and an inspiration he had never known elsewhere. The longing in his heart to paint that had been scarcely more than an urge, took definite and splendid shape. Someone else had the executive job in his father's manufacturing plant. That he grew to know that Aunt Achsa needed him and looked forward to his coming strengthened the bond that brought him back to Sunset Lane each spring. No one had ever needed him before and it was a man-satisfying sensation. And in Aunt Achsa's affection for him there was a depth which he divined but only vaguely understood. In his hardy six feet four the compassionate mother-woman was seeing her poor Lavender, big and strong and "straight." To her Dugald was what Lavender "wasn't"; in her way she put him and Lavender together and made a satisfying whole. Sometimes she wondered if Dugald might not be the answer to her prayers!