"Why, Lorna! you are tearing that letter up without reading it."
"I don't need to read it."
"But you would see by what she writes that I tell you the truth," he urged.
She allowed the bits of paper to flutter away across the sands. She turned her piquant face toward him so that he might see her smile and the light in her eyes.
"I need nobody to guarantee your word, Ralph Endicott," she said softly. "I know you are one man without guile."
The old-fashioned fall flowers in Miss Heppy's garden (those which the high sea had not torn away) made brilliant patches of color upon the bleached sand before the lighthouse. Tobias o' the Light sat on the bench beside the door nursing a well-colored pipe.
Out of the open kitchen door floated a delicious odor of frying doughnuts. Miss Heppy, frying fork in hand and with glowing countenance, presided over the kettle while the heap of brown rings and twists grew higher in the bowl on the stove shelf.
"Heppy," her brother said reflectively, removing the pipe from between his lips to look at it, "I cal'late I will buy me that silver-banded pipe Si Compton's got in his store case, after all."
He said it tentatively, and then cocked his ear for her reply.
"Tobias Bassett! air you a plumb fool?"