“I—see,” Lis said, slowly. “I guess there’s a big misunderstanding somewhere, Ricky. You’re not the sort to be unfair to a strange girl, particularly when she’s in trouble over losing her mother and her home like poor Milly. Neither is Tommy. Too bad, though. She seems to me a—kind of a sweet girl, if she’d only open up and talk a little about what’s worrying her, instead of moping round in corners, thinking of it, whatever it is, all the time. Say, look at that wave coming in!” he added, changing the subject without waiting for Erica’s reply. “Be ready to run, Rick; she’s sure coming clear up the beach to the dunes.” In the breathless, laughing dash for higher ground that followed—for the wave _did_ wash far up the beach as Lis had predicted—there was no chance for words of any sort, and when the two had scrambled up to the dune-top they had both forgotten, temporarily at least, their short-lived irritation with each other. They tramped for several miles down the beach after that, discussing China now, for the most part, and the absorbing possibility of Sun Li’s really coming to Nantucket one day in the future, or the still more exciting one of Captain Eric’s taking Erica to visit in those closed, palace rooms to which she wore the little silver-and-jade key about her neck. That evening after supper, while Mrs. Folger was upstairs putting little Barbee Thorne to bed, Lis from his deep chair at one side of the hearth (spring evenings on Nantucket are quite cold enough for open fires), looked over with troubled eyes at a slight, black-frocked little figure curled up in the big chair just across from him, apparently absorbed in a book. It came over the boy that he seldom saw Milly in the house without a book for company—for her sole company; that was the pitiful part of it. Safe in her evident unawareness of his very presence in the room, Lis studied the bent head with its smooth, thick braids of hair that looked in the firelight like lustrous black satin. Milly’s big, rather sulky dark eyes—her only real claim to beauty—were hidden by her lashes as she read, and the un-childish, thin young face seemed thinner and whiter than ever in the alternate play across it of fireshine and shadow. Lis felt his heart contract a little at the sight. She looked, he thought suddenly, like a lost and miserable black kitten; one that had been starved, as well as frightened pretty badly about something.