After the meal was finished I went down to the boathouse. The boathouse was a little building on the beach at the foot of the bluff below the house. It was a favorite resort of mine and I spent many hours there. My eighteen foot motor launch, the Comfort, the one expensive luxury I allowed myself and which I had bought second-hand two years before, was jacked up in the middle of the floor. The engine, which I had taken apart to clean, was in pieces beside it. On the walls hung my two shot guns and my fishing rod. Outside, on the beach, was my flat-bottomed skiff, which I used for rowing about the bay, her oars under the thwarts. In the boathouse was a comfortable armchair and a small shelf of books, novels for the most part. A cheap clock and a broken-down couch, the latter a discard from the original outfit of the cottage, made up the list of furniture.
My idea in coming to the boathouse was to continue my work with the engine. I tried it for a half hour or so and then gave it up. It did not interest me then. I shut the door at the side of the building, that by which I had entered—the big double doors in front I had not opened at all—and, taking a book from the shelf, stretched myself on the couch to read.
The book I had chosen was one belonging to the Denboro Ladies' Library; Miss Almena Doane, the librarian, had recommended it highly, as a “real interesting story, with lots of uplifting thoughts in it.” The thoughts might be uplifting to Almena, but they did not elevate my spirits. As for the story—well, the hero was a young gentleman who was poor but tremendously clever and handsome, and the heroine had eyes “as dark and deep as starlit pools.” The poor but beautiful person met the pool-eyed one at a concert, where he sat, “his whole soul transfigured by the music,” and she had been “fascinated in spite of herself” by the look on his face. I read as far as that and dropped the book in disgust.
After that I must have fallen asleep. What awakened me was a knock on the door. It was Lute, of course. Probably mother wanted me for something or other, and Dorinda had sent her husband to hunt me up.
The knock was repeated.
“Come in,” I said, sleepily.
The door opened and in came, not Lute, but a tall, portly man, with a yachting cap on the back of his gray head, and a cigar in his mouth. He looked at me as I lay on the couch and I lay on the couch and looked at him.
“Afternoon,” he said, curtly. “Is your name Paine?”
I nodded. I was waking rapidly, but I was too astonished to speak.
“Roscoe Paine?”