“I’m sure you must live in Silver Sands.”

“I do,” he responded. “It is a good place to live. My particular corner is just down that next street, the white house with the rose trellis over the door. I board with a blessed old lady whom everybody calls Aunt Katie Barnes. She nearly turns herself out of house and home trying to find new ways of making me comfortable. It is a very friendly community. They take one in heart and soul.”

She flashed him an appreciative glance and asked thoughtfully: “Have you known my father long?”

“Well, not so very long—” the minister answered, “that is—you know he has only recently returned, but we are wonderfully good friends considering the short time. I—you—” He hesitated. There was something he wanted to tell her for her reassurance, to answer the question in her eyes that he felt sure she was too loyal to her father to ask, but his lips were sealed. And after all, what was there to say even if they had not been? What reassurance had he himself that the man he had left raving at Fate in the old library would give any sort of an adequate welcome to this pearl of a girl? He felt as if he wanted to tell her that if her father wasn’t glad to see her he would take him by the neck and shake him till he was. But one couldn’t tell a strange girl things like that about her father.

“This is the Presbyterian church we are coming to now, the one on the left. The main part was built in sixteen hundred and seventeen. Hasn’t it nobly simple lines? The stones have weathered to as fine a color as any cathedral in the old world. I love to see it against the sky with the sunset behind it. That spire is a thing of beauty, don’t you think? And those doves in the belfry are a continual delight. Do you know Aldrich’s bit of a verse, ‘And on the belfry sits a dove with purple ripples on her neck?’ There goes one now swooping down to the pavement. Did you see the silver flash on her wings? And now we’re coming to the part of the cemetery where your ancestors are buried. See that big gray granite column? No, the plain one just beyond. That is the old Silver lot. All the Silvers are lying there. Your grandfather and great-grandfather and their wives in that center plot, and those side plots are for the sons and their wives and children. It was a peculiar arrangement and forethought of the first Silver settler and carried out by each succeeding one in turn. There, those two gray stones are for Standish Silver and his sister Lavinia, the last of the family who bore the Silver name.”

“Aunt Lavinia and Uncle Standish. I have their pictures,” said the girl softly as if doing homage to their memory. “They brought up my father.”

She lifted shy friendly eyes: “Silver is my name, too. It’s an odd name for a girl, isn’t it? But I like it. I like to think I’m a Silver, too.”

“It is a beautiful name,” said the young man, doing homage with his eyes.

“They were a wonderful people from all I hear. I would like to have known them.”

And now all too soon they were at the Silver door and he was helping her out of the car.

He found his heart pounding strangely with anticipation for the girl at his side. How would she be received? He felt as if he must stay by her till he was sure, although delicacy dictated that he disappear as soon as his errand was done.

Blink, with nonchalant foresight, was idly flipping pebbles at a toad in the meadow from his perch on the fence, his back to the road. At his feet, attentive to each motion, apparently approving and aiding and abetting the game, barked a big yellow collie.