"Pretty lonesome, isn't it?" Mr. Magee glanced over his shoulder at the shadows that crept in on them. "I was finding it very busy when you came," she answered. "You see, I have known the inn when it was gay with summer people, and as I sat here by the fire I pretended I saw the ghosts of a lot of the people I knew flitting about in the dusk. The rocking-chair fleet sailed by--" "The what?" "Black flag flying, decks cleared for action--I saw the rocking-chair fleet go by." She smiled faintly. "We always called them that. Bitter, unkind old women who sat hour after hour on the veranda, and rocked and gossiped, and gossiped and rocked. All the old women in the world seem to gather at summer hotels. And, oh, the cruel mouths the fleet had--just thin lines of mouths--I used to look at them and wonder if any one had ever kissed them." The girl's eyes were very large and tender in the firelight. "And I saw some poor little ghosts weeping in a corner," she went on; "a few that the fleet had run down and sunk in the sea of gossip. A little ghost whose mother had not been all she should have been, and the fleet found it out, and rocked, and whispered, and she went away. And a few who were poor--the most terrible of sins--to them the fleet showed no mercy. And a fine proud girl, Myra Thornhill, who was engaged to a man named Kendrick, and who never dared come here again after Kendrick suddenly disappeared, because of the whispered dishonors the fleet heaped upon his head." "What wicked women!" said Magee. "The wickedest women in the world," answered the girl. "But every summer resort must have its fleet. I doubt if any other ever had its admiral, though--and that makes Baldpate supreme." "Its admiral?" "Yes. He isn't really that, I imagine--sort of a vice, or an assistant, or whatever it is, long ago retired from the navy. Every summer he comes here, and the place revolves about him. It's all so funny. I wonder if any other crowd attains such heights of snobbishness as that at a summer resort? It's the admiral this, and the admiral that, from the moment he enters the door. Nearly every day the manager of Baldpate has a new picture of the admiral taken, and hangs it here in the hotel. I'll show them to you when it's light. There's one over there by the desk, of the admiral and the manager together, and the manager has thrown his arm carelessly over the admiral's shoulder with 'See how well I know him' written all over his stupid face. Oh, what snobs they are!" "And the fleet?" asked Mr. Magee. "Worships him. They fish all day for a smile from him. They keep track of his goings and comings, and when he is in the card-room playing his silly old game of solitaire, they run down their victims in subdued tones so as not to disturb him." "What an interesting place," said Mr. Magee. "I must visit Baldpate next summer. Shall--shall you be here?"