"What is it?" I cried. "Look!" he said, "it's come." Silently, shoulder to shoulder, we stood and watched the gigantic storm-bales roll into the sky--packed in fleece, corded with ropes of mist, gorgeous, portentous,--To-morrow's Rain! It is not many hosts and hostesses under like circumstances who turn to each other as we did with a single whoop of joy! An hour later, hatless and coatless in the lovely warm May twilight, we stood by the larch tree waiting for our guests. We like to have them sup in town at their own discretion or indiscretion, that first night, and all arrive together reasonably sleek and sleepy, and totally unacquainted, on the eight o'clock train. But the larch tree has always been our established point for meeting the _Rainy Week_ people. Conceding cordially the truth of the American aphorism that while charity may perfectly legitimately begin at home, hospitality should begin at the railroad station! We personally have proved beyond all doubt that for our immediate interests at stake dramatic effect begins at the entrance to our driveway. Yet it is always with mingled feelings of trepidation and anticipation that we first sense the blurry rumble of motor wheels on the highway. If the station bus were only blue or green! But palest oak! And shuttered like a roll-top desk! Spilling out strange personalities at you like other people's ideas brimming from pigeon-holes! For some unfathomable reason of constraint this night, no one was talking when the bus arrived. Shy, stiff-spined, non-communicative, still questioning, perhaps. Who was who and what was what, these seven guests who by the return ride a week hence might even be mated, such things have happened, or once more not speaking to each other, this also has happened, loomed now like so many dummies in the gloom. "Why, Hello!" we cried, jumping to the rear step of the bus as it slowed slightly at the curb, and thrusting our faces as genially as possible into the dark, unresponsive doorway. "Hello!" rallied someone--I think it was Rollins. Whoever it was he seemed to be having a terrible time trying to jerk his suitcase across other people's feet. "Oh, is this where you live?" questioned George Keets's careful voice from the shadows. The faintest possible tinge of relief seemed to be in the question. "Here?" brightened somebody else. A window-fastener clicked, a shutter crashed, an aperture opened, and everybody all at once, scenting the sea, crowded to stare out where the gray dusk merging into gray rocks merged in turn with the gray rocks into a low rambling gray fieldstone house silhouetted with indescribable weirdness at the moment against that delicate, pale gold, French-drawing-room sort of sky cluttered so incongruously with the clump of dark clouds. "The road--doesn't go any farther?" puzzled someone. "There's no other stopping place you mean--just a little bit farther along? This is the end,--the last house,--the----?"