The ever-ready tears, too, began to leave marks. She was not looking her best. In her lonely misery the girl was glad of this. She wished Conover would call by daylight instead of at night, so that he might see and be repelled by what she was pleased to term the “ravages” his attentions were wreaking on her once placid face. Caine and her father, it is true, gave most flattering heed to these “ravages”; but heartlessly ascribed them to hot weather and need of change to the country. Mrs. Standish’s vitreous gaze, too, mingled a mild curiosity with its irritating benevolence. Once she asked Letty quite tactfully if the engagement with Caine were not perhaps a mistake and if the girl might not be in danger of blighting her God-given young life by a loveless marriage. To which random shot Letty paid the passing tribute of a flood of tears that convinced Mrs. Standish of her own spiritual inspiration in putting the question. The net result of it all was that Letty and her aunt were packed off, with Clive, to the seaside for a month. Miss Standish’s departure did not greatly trouble Caleb. He himself was nearing the beginning of his much heralded “first vacation.” Indeed, Caine, coming disconsolately to the Fighter’s room, one evening, just after seeing Letty’s train off, found Conover sitting on the floor beside an open trunk. A mass of clothing, also on the floor, radiated away from the trunk on every side. Perspiring, red of face, Caleb was reaching out methodically for garments, folding them with slow care of the self-made man and stowing them away in fast-rising layers in the leathern maw that gaped so hungrily for them. “I’ve just come from seeing Miss Standish and her aunt off to Block Island,” announced Caine, routing a pile of clothes from a chair and seating himself. “Block Island, hey?” said Caleb, “Anything like Coney?” “No,” laughed Caine, “nor like any other place on earth. A treeless plateau above the ocean. Ugly at first glance, but with a hundred-year-old charm that somehow grips one. Sea, sunshine and wind; and the eternal roar of the surf.” “H’m!” grunted Caleb, disapprovingly, “Nice, lively sort of a joint for a busy man to go lookin’ for fun! ’Bout as jolly as its own jail, I should think.” “It has no jail,” retorted Caine, “No jail, no almshouse, no asylum. There hasn’t been a criminal, nor a pauper, nor an insane person on the whole island in a century. There is only one policeman--or was when I used to go there. And he used to take turns serving as driver of one of the Island’s two horse-cars. There’s a historic yoke of oxen, too, that--” “Not a jail--or a crime--or an institootion of any sort?” cried Conover. “Son, you’re stringin’ me! What do the local pol’ticians do for a livin’, then? If Noo York’s a paradise for grafters, this Block Island of yours must be a hell for ’em. Ain’t anyone ever waked up there to the chances that’s layin’ around waitin’ to be took?”