"Who is Mr. Cope?" Becky asked. Mr. Cope, it seemed, had a cottage across the road from the Admiral's. He leased it, and it was his first season at 'Sconset. His sister had been with him only a week ago. She had gone "off-shore," but she was coming back. "Is he young?" Becky asked. "Well, he isn't old," said Jane, "and he's an artist." Becky was not in the least interested in Mr. Cope, so she talked to Tristram until he had to go back to his farm and the cows that waited to be milked. Then Becky went into her room, and took off her hat and coat and ran a comb through the bronze waves of her hair. She did not change the straight serge frock in which she had travelled. She went back into the front room and found that Mr. Cope had come. He was not old. That was at once apparent. And he was not young. He did not look in the least like an artist. He seemed, rather, like a prosperous business man. He wore a Norfolk suit, and his reddish hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. He had rather humorous gray eyes, and Becky thought there was a look of delicacy about his white skin. Later he spoke of having come for his health, and she learned that he had a weak heart. He had a pleasant laughing voice. He belonged to Boston, but had lived abroad for years. "With nothing to show for it," he told her with a shrug, "but one portrait. I painted my sister, and she kept that. But before we left Paris we burned the rest----" "Oh, how dreadful," Becky cried. "No, it wasn't dreadful. They were not worth keeping. You see, I played a lot and made sketches and things, and then there was the war--and I wasn't very well." He had had two years of aviation, and after that a desk in the War Department. "And now I am painting again." "Gardens?" Becky asked, "or the sea?" "Neither. I am trying to paint the moor. I'll show you in the morning." The Admiral was in the kitchen, superintending the chowder. Jane knew how to make it, and he knew that she knew. But he always went into the kitchen at the psychological moment, tied on an apron, and put in the pilot crackers. Then he brought the chowder in, in a big porcelain tureen which was shaped like a goose. Becky loved him in his white apron, with his round red face, and the porcelain goose held high. "If you could paint him like that," she suggested to Archibald Cope. "Do you think he would let me?" eagerly. After supper the two men smoked by the fire, and Becky sat between them and watched the blaze. She heard very little of the conversation. Her mind was in Albemarle. How far away it seemed! Just three nights ago she had danced at the Merriweathers' ball, and George had held her hand as she leaned over the balcony. "If you can bring yourself back for a moment, Becky, to present company," her grandfather was saying, "you can tell Mr. Cope whether you will walk with us to-morrow to Tom Never's." "I'd love it." "Really?" Cope asked. "You are sure you won't be too tired?"