And then the Civil War came on, and when its wave of patriotism reached far-off Rockhaven, Jess Hutton, then a sturdy young man, enlisting in the navy under Farragut, served his country bravely and well. Then Jess came back, a limping hero, to find his brother Jethro deeply in love with pretty Letty Carver, for whom Jess had cherished a boyish admiration, and in a fair way to secure a home, with her as a chief incentive. Jess made no comment when he saw which way the wind blew in that quarter, but, philosopher that he was, even then, quietly but promptly turned his face away from the island and for a score of years Rockhaven knew not of his whereabouts. Gossips, recalling how he and Letty, as grown-up school children, had played together along the sandy beach of the little harbor or by the old tide mill, then grinding its grist, asserted that Jess had been driven away by disappointment; but beyond surmise they could not go, for to no one did he impart one word of his reasons for leaving the island and the scenes of his boyhood. Twenty years later, Letty Carver, who had become Mrs. Jethro Hutton, was left a widow with one child, a little girl named Mona, a small white cottage on Rock Lane, and, so far as any one knew, not much else. And then Jess Hutton returned. Once more the gossips became busy with what Jess would or should do, especially as he seemed to have brought back sufficient means to at once build a respectable dwelling place, the upper half fitted for a domicile and the lower for a store. But all surmise came to naught, together with all the well-meant and excellent domestic paths mapped out by the busybodies for Jess and the widow to follow, for when the combination house was done and the store stocked, Jess Hutton attended regularly to the latter and kept bachelor's hall in the former; and though he was an occasional caller at the cottage in Rock Lane and usually walked to church with the widow and little Mona on Sundays, the store and its customers by day or night were his chief care, and his solitary home merely a place to sleep in. And yet not; for beyond that, during his many years of wandering on the mainland, he had contracted the habit of amusing himself with the violin when lonesome, and Jess, the eccentric old bachelor, as some termed him, and his fiddle became a curiosity among the odd and yet simple people of Rockhaven. Then, too, the little girl, Mona, his niece, became, as she grew up, his protegee and care, and he her one inseparable friend and adviser. CHAPTER V JESS HUTTON