Peter was not good-looking. He was not even, in a sense, attractive. In spite of his taking work so hardly and life so seriously, he was entirely too stout. This gave a heaviness to his face that neutralized his really pleasant brown eyes and thick brown hair, which were his best features. Manly the face was, but, except when speaking in unconscious moments, dull and unstriking. A fellow three inches shorter, and two-thirds his weight would have been called tall. “Big” was the favorite adjective used in describing Peter, and big he was. Had he gone through college ten years later, he might have won unstinted fame and admiration as the full-back on the team, or stroke on the crew. In his time, athletics were but just obtaining, and were not yet approved of either by faculties or families. Shakespeare speaks of a tide in the affairs of men. Had Peter been born ten years later the probabilities are that his name would have been in all the papers, that he would have weighed fifty pounds less, have been cheered by thousands, have been the idol of his class, have been a hero, have married the first girl he loved (for heroes, curiously, either marry or die, but never remain bachelors) and would have—but as this is a tale of fact, we must not give rein to imagination. To come back to realism, Peter was a hero to nobody but his mother. Such was the man, who, two weeks after graduation from Harvard, was pacing up and down the deck of Mr. Pierce’s yacht, the “Sunrise,” as she drifted with the tide in Long Island Sound. Yet if his expression, as he walked, could for a moment have been revealed to those seated aft, the face that all thought dull and uninteresting would have riveted their attention, and set each one questioning whether there might not be something both heroic and romantic underneath. The set determination of his look can best be explained by telling what had given his face such rigid lines. CHAPTER III. A CRAB CHAPTER. Mr. Pierce and those about him had clearly indicated by the conversation, or rather monologue, already recorded, that Peter was in a sense an odd number in the “Sunrise’s” complement of pleasure-seekers. Whether or no Mr. Pierce’s monologue also indicated that he was not a map who dealt in odd numbers, or showered hospitality on sons of mill-overseers, the fact was nevertheless true. “For value received,” or “I hereby promise to pay,” were favorite formulas of Mr. Pierce, and if not actually written in such invitations as he permitted his wife to write at his dictation to people whom he decided should be bidden to the Shrubberies, a longer or shorter time would develop the words, as if written in sympathetic ink. Yet Peter had had as pressing an invitation and as warm a welcome at Mr. Pierce’s country place as had any of the house-party ingathered during the first week of July. Clearly something made him of value to the owner of the Shrubberies. That something was his chum, Watts D’Alloi.