“Have I found you, Miss Lothrop?”

Looking over her shoulder, Lois saw the handsome features of Mr. Caruthers, wearing a smile of most undoubted satisfaction.  And, to the scorn of all her previous considerations, she was conscious of a flush of pleasure in her own mind.  This was not suffered to appear.

“I thought I was where nobody could find me,” she answered.

“Do you think there is such a place in the whole world?” said Tom gallantly.  Meanwhile he scrambled over some inconvenient rocks to a place by her side.  “I am very glad to find you, Miss Lothrop, both ways, ­first at Appledore, and then here.”

To this compliment Lois made no reply.

“What has driven you to this little out-of-the-way nook?”

“You mean Appledore?”

“No, no! this very uncomfortable situation among the rocks here?  What drove you to it?”

“You think there is no attraction?”

“I don’t see what attraction there is here for you.”

“Then you should not have come to Appledore.”

“Why not?”

“There is nothing here for you.”

“Ah, but!  What is there for you?  Do you find anything here to like now, really?”

“I have been down in this ‘uncomfortable place’ ever since near five o’clock ­except while we were at breakfast.”

“What for?”

“What for?” said Lois, laughing.  “If you ask, it is no use to tell you, Mr. Caruthers.”

“Ah, be generous!” said Tom.  “I’m a stupid fellow, I know; but do try and help me a little to a sense of the beautiful. Is it the beautiful, by the way, or is it something else?”

Lois’s laugh rang softly out again.  She was a country girl, it is true; but her laugh was as sweet to hear as the ripple of the waters among the stones.  The laugh of anybody tells very much of what he is, making revelations undreamt of often by the laugher.  A harsh croak does not come from a mind at peace, nor an empty clangour from a heart full of sensitive happiness; nor a coarse laugh from a person of refined sensibilities, nor a hard laugh from a tender spirit.  Moreover, people cannot dissemble successfully in laughing; the truth comes out in a startling manner.  Lois’s laugh was sweet and musical; it was a pleasure to hear.  And Tom’s eyes said so.

“I always knew I was a stupid fellow,” he said; “but I never felt myself so stupid as to-day!  What is it, Miss Lothrop?”

“What is what, Mr. Caruthers? ­I beg your pardon.”

“What is it you find in this queer place?”

“I am afraid it is waste trouble to tell you.”

“Good morning!” cried a cheery voice here from below them; and looking towards the water they saw Mr. Lenox, making his way as best he could over slippery seaweed and wet rocks.

“Hollo, George!” cried Tom in a different tone ­“What are you doing there?”

“Trying to keep out of the water, don’t you see?”

“To an ordinary mind, that object would seem more likely to be attained if you kept further away from it.”

“May I come up where you are?”

“Certainly!” said Lois.  “But take care how you do it.”

A little scrambling and the help of Tom’s hand accomplished the feat; and the new comer looked about him with much content.

“You came the other way,” he said.  “I see.  I shall know how next time.  What a delightful post, Miss Lothrop!”

“I have been trying to find what she came here for; and she won’t tell me,” said Tom.

“You know what you came here for,” said his friend.  “Why cannot you credit other people with as much curiosity as you have yourself?”

“I credit them with more,” said Tom.  “But curiosity on Appledore will find itself baffled, I should say.”

“Depends on what curiosity is after,” said Lenox.  “Tell him, Miss Lothrop; he will not be any the wiser.”

“Then why should I tell him?” said Lois.

“Perhaps I shall!”

Lois’s laugh came again.

“Seriously.  If any one were to ask me, not only what we but what anybody should come to this place for, I should be unprepared with an answer.  I am forcibly reminded of an old gentleman who went up Mount Washington on one occasion when I also went up.  It came on to rain ­a sudden summer gust and downpour, hiding the very mountain it self from our eyes; hiding the path, hiding the members of the party from each other.  We were descending the mountain by that time, and it was ticklish work for a nervous person; every one was committed to his own sweet guidance; and as I went blindly stumbling along, I came every now and then upon the old gentleman, also stumbling along, on his donkey.  And whenever I was near enough to him, I could hear him dismally soliloquizing, ’Why am I here!’ ­in a tone of mingled disgust and self-reproach which was in the highest degree comical.”

“So that is your state of mind now, is it?” said Tom.

“Not quite yet, but I feel it is going to be.  Unless Miss Lothrop can teach me something.”

“There are some things that cannot be taught,” said Lois.

“And people ­hey?  But I am not one of those, Miss Lothrop.”

He looked at her with such a face of demure innocence, that Lois could not keep her gravity.

“Now Tom is,” Lenox went on.  “You cannot teach him anything, Miss Lothrop.  It would be lost labour.”

“I am not so stupid as you think,” said Tom.

“He’s not stupid ­he’s obstinate,” Lenox went on, addressing himself to Lois.  “He takes a thing in his head.  Now that sounds intelligent; but it isn’t, or he isn’t; for when you try, you can’t get it out of his head again.  So he took it into his head to come to the Isles of Shoals, and hither he has dragged his mother and his sister, and hither by consequence he has dragged me.  Now I ask you, as one who can tell ­what have we all come here for?”

Half-quizzically, half-inquisitively, the young man put the question, lounging on the rocks and looking up into Lois’s face.  Tom grew impatient.  But Lois was too humble and simple-minded to fall into the snare laid for her.  I think she had a half-discernment of a hidden intent under Mr. Lenox’s words; nevertheless in the simple dignity of truth she disregarded it, and did not even blush, either with consciousness or awkwardness.  She was a little amused.

“I suppose experience will have to be your teacher, as it is other people’s.”

“I have heard so; I never saw anybody who had learned much that way.”

“Come, George, that’s ridiculous.  Learning by experience is proverbial,” said Tom.

“I know! ­but it’s a delusion nevertheless.  You sprain your ankle among these stones, for instance.  Well ­you won’t put your foot in that particular hole again; but you will in another.  That’s the way you do, Tom.  But to return ­Miss Lothrop, what has experience done for you in the Isles of Shoals?”

“I have not had much yet.”

“Does it pay to come here?”

“I think it does.”

“How came anybody to think of coming here at first? that is what I should like to know.  I never saw a more uncompromising bit of barrenness.  Is there no desolation anywhere else, that men should come to the Isles of Shoals?”

“There was quite a large settlement here once,” said Lois.

“Indeed!  When?”

“Before the war of the revolution.  There were hundreds of people; six hundred, somebody told me.”

“What became of them?”

“Well,” said Lois, smiling, “as that is more than a hundred years ago, I suppose they all died.”

“And their descendants? ­”

“Living on the mainland, most of them.  When the war came, they could not protect themselves against the English.”

“Fancy, Tom,” said Lenox.  “People liked it so well on these rocks, that it took ships of war to drive them away!”

“The people that live here now are just as fond of them, I am told.”

“What earthly or heavenly inducement? ­”

“Yes, I might have said so too, the first hour of my being here, or the first day.  The second, I began to understand it.”

“Do make me understand it!”

“If you will come here at five o’clock to-morrow, Mr. Leno ­xin the morning, I mean, ­and will watch the wonderful sunrise, the waking up of land and sea; if you will stay here then patiently till ten o’clock, and see the changes and the colours on everything ­let the sea and the sky speak to you, as they will; then they will tell you ­all you can understand!”

“All I can understand.  H’m!  May I go home for breakfast?”

“Perhaps you must; but you will wish you need not.”

“Will you be here?”

“No,” said Lois.  “I will be somewhere else.”

“But I couldn’t stand such a long talk with myself as that,” said the young man.

“It was a talk with Nature I recommended to you.”

“All the same.  Nature says queer things if you let her alone.”

“Best listen to them, then.”

“Why?”

“She tells you the truth.”

“Do you like the truth?”

“Certainly.  Of course.  Do not you?”

“Always?”

“Yes, always.  Do not you?”

“It’s fearfully awkward!” said the young man.

“Yes, isn’t it?” Tom echoed.

“Do you like falsehood, Mr. Lenox?”

“I dare not say what I like ­in this presence.  Miss Lothrop, I am very much afraid you are a Puritan.”

“What is a Puritan?” asked Lois simply.

“He doesn’t know!” said Tom.  “You needn’t ask him.”

“I will ask you then, for I do not know.  What does he mean by it?”

“He doesn’t know that,” said Lenox, laughing.  “I will tell you, Miss Lothrop ­if I can.  A Puritan is a person so much better than the ordinary run of mortals, that she is not afraid to let Nature and Solitude speak to her ­dares to look roses in the face, in fact; ­has no charity for the crooked ways of the world or for the people entangled in them; a person who can bear truth and has no need of falsehood, and who is thereby lifted above the multitudes of this world’s population, and stands as it were alone.”

“I’ll report that speech to Julia,” said Tom, laughing.

“But that is not what a ‘Puritan’ generally means, is it?” said Lois.  They both laughed now at the quain’t simplicity with which this was spoken.

“That is what it is,” Tom answered.

“I do not think the term is complimentary,” Lois went on, shaking her head, “however Mr. Lenox’s explanation may be.  Isn’t it ten o’clock?”

“Near eleven.”

“Then I must go in.”

The two gentlemen accompanied her, making themselves very pleasant by the way.  Lenox asked her about flowers; and Tom, who was some thing of a naturalist, told her about mosses and lichens, more than she knew; and the walk was too short for Lois.  But on reaching the hotel she went straight to her own room and stayed there.  So also after dinner, which of course brought her to the company, she went back to her solitude and her work.  She must write home, she said.  Yet writing was not Lois’s sole reason for shutting herself up.

She would keep herself out of the way, she reasoned.  Probably this company of city people with city tastes would not stay long at Appledore; while they were there she had better be seen as little as possible.  For she felt that the sight of Tom Caruthers’ handsome face had been a pleasure; and she felt ­and what woman does not? ­that there is a certain very sweet charm in being liked, independently of the question how much you like in return.  And Lois knew, though she hardly in her modesty acknowledged it to herself, that Mr. Caruthers liked her.  Eyes and smiles and manner showed it; she could not mistake it; nay, engaged man though he was, Mr. Lenox liked her too.  She did not quite understand him or his manner; with the keen intuition of a true woman she felt vaguely what she did not clearly discern, and was not sure of the colour of his liking, as she was sure of Tom’s.  Tom’s ­it might not be deep, but it was true, and it was pleasant; and Lois remembered her promise to her grandmother.  She even, when her letter was done, took out her Bible and opened it at that well-known place in 2nd Corinthians; “Be not unequally yoked together with unbelievers” ­and she looked hard at the familiar words.  Then, said Lois to herself, it is best to keep at a distance from temptation.  For these people were unbelievers.  They could not understand one word of Christian hope or joy, if she spoke them.  What had she and they in common?

Yet Lois drew rather a long breath once or twice in the course of her meditations.  These “unbelievers” were so pleasant.  Yes, it was an undoubted fact; they were pleasant people to be with and to talk to.  They might not think with her, or comprehend her even, in the great questions of life and duty; in the lesser matters of everyday experience they were well versed.  They understood the world and the things in the world, and the men; and they were skilled and deft and graceful in the arts of society.  Lois knew no young men, ­nor old, for that matter, ­who were, as gentlemen, as social companions, to be compared with these and others their associates in graces of person and manner, and interest of conversation.  She went over again and again in memory the interview and the talk of that morning; and not without a secret thrill of gratification, although also not without a vague half perception of something in Mr. Lenox’s manner that she could not quite read and did not quite trust.  What did he mean?  He was Miss Caruthers’ property; how came he to busy himself at all with her own insignificant self?  Lois was too innocent to guess; at the same time too finely gifted as a woman to be entirely hoodwinked.  She rose at last with a third little sigh, as she concluded that her best way was to keep as well away as she could from this pleasant companionship.

But she could not stay in-doors.  For once in her life she was at Appledore; she must not miss her chance.  The afternoon was half gone; the house all still; probably everybody was in his room, and she could slip out safely.  She went down on soft feet; she found nobody on the piazza, not a creature in sight; she was glad; and yet, she would not have been sorry to see Tom Caruthers’ genial face, which was always so very genial towards her.  Inconsistent! ­but who is not inconsistent?  Lois thought herself free, and had half descended the steps from the verandah, when she heard a voice and her own name.  She paused and looked round.

“Miss Lothrop! ­are you going for a walk? may I come with you?” ­and therewith emerged the form of Miss Julia from the house.  “Are you going for a walk? will you let me go along?”

“Certainly,” said Lois.

“I am regularly cast away here,” said the young lady, joining her.  “I don’t know what to do with myself. Is there anything to do or to see in this place?”

“I think so.  Plenty.”

“Then do show me what you have found.  Where are you going?”

“I am going down to the shore somewhere.  I have only begun to find things yet; but I never in my life saw a place where there was so much to find.”

“What, pray?  I cannot imagine.  I see a little wild bit of ground, and that is all I see; except the sea beating on the rocks.  It is the forlornest place of amusement I ever heard of in my life!”

“Are you fond of flowers, Miss Caruthers?”

“Flowers?  No, not very.  O, I like them to dress a dinner table, or to make rooms look pretty, of course; but I am not what you call ‘fond’ of them.  That means, loving to dig in the dirt, don’t it?”

Lois presently stooped and gathered a flower or two.

“Did yon ever see such lovely white violets?” she said; “and is not that eyebright delicate, with its edging of colour?  There are quantities of flowers here.  And have you noticed how deep and rich the colours are?  No, you have not been here long enough perhaps; but they are finer than any I ever saw of their kinds.”

“What do you find down at the shore?” said Miss Caruthers, looking very disparagingly at the slight beauties in Lois’s fingers.  “There are no flowers there, I suppose?”

“I can hardly get away from the shore, every time I go to it,” said Lois.  “O, I have only begun to explore yet.  Over on that end of Appledore there are the old remains of a village, where the people used to live, once upon a time.  I want to go and see that, but I haven’t got there yet.  Now take care of your footing, Miss Caruthers ­”

They descended the rocks to one of the small coves of the island.  Out of sight now of all save rocks and sea and the tiny bottom of the cove filled with mud and sand.  Even the low bushes which grow so thick on Appledore were out of sight, huckleberry and bayberry and others; the wildness and solitude of the spot were perfect.  Miss Caruthers found a dry seat on a rock.  Lois began to look carefully about in the mud and sand.

“What are you looking for?” her companion asked, somewhat scornfully.

“Anything I can find!”

“What can you find in that mud?”

“This is gravel, where I am looking now.”

“Well, what is in the gravel?”

“I don’t know,” said Lois, in the dreamy tone of rapt enjoyment.  “I don’t know yet.  Plenty of broken shells.”

“Broken shells!” ejaculated the other.  “Are you collecting broken shells?”

“Look,” said Lois, coming to her and displaying her palm full of sea treasures.  “See the colours of those bits of shell ­that’s a bit of a mussel; and that is a piece of a snail shell, I think; and aren’t those little stones lovely?”

“That is because they are wet!” said the other in disgust.  “They will be nothing when they are dry.”

Lois laughed and went back to her search; and Miss Julia waited awhile with impatience for some change in the programme.

“Do you enjoy this, Miss Lothrop?”

“Very much!  More than I can in any way tell you!” cried Lois, stopping and turning to look at her questioner.  Her face answered for her; it was all flushed and bright with delight and the spirit of discovery; a pretty creature indeed she looked as she stood there on the wet gravel of the cove; but her face lost brightness for a moment, as Lois discerned Tom’s head above the herbs and grasses that bordered the bank above the cove.  Julia saw the change, and then the cause of it.

“Tom!” said she, “what brought you here?”

“What brought you, I suppose,” said Mr. Tom, springing down the bank.  “Miss Lothrop, what can you be doing?” Passing his sister he went to the other girl’s side.  And now there were two searching and peering into the mud and gravel which the tide had left wet and bare; and Miss Caruthers, sitting on a rock a little above them, looked on; much marvelling at the follies men will be guilty of when a pretty face draws them on.

“Tom ­Tom! ­what do you expect to find?” she cried after awhile.  But Tom was too busy to heed her.  And then appeared Mr. Lenox upon the scene.

“You too!” said Miss Caruthers.  “Now you have only to go down into the mud like the others and complete the situation.  Look at Tom!  Poking about to see if he can find a whole snail shell in the wet stuff there.  Look at him!  George, a brother is the most vexatious thing to take care of in the world.  Look at Tom!”

Mr. Lenox did, with an amused expression of feature.

“Bad job, Julia,” he said.

“It is in one way, but it isn’t in another, for I am not going to be baffled.  He shall not make a fool of himself with that girl.”

“She isn’t a fool.”

“What then?” said Julia sharply.

“Nothing.  I was only thinking of the materials upon which your judgment is made up.”

“Materials!” echoed Julia.  “Yours is made up upon a nice complexion.  That bewilders all men’s faculties.  Do you think she is very pretty, George?”

Mr. Lenox had no time to answer, for Lois, and of course Tom, at this moment left the cove bottom and came towards them.  Lois was beaming, like a child, with such bright, pure pleasure; and coming up, showed upon her open palm a very delicate little white shell, not a snail shell by any means.  “I have found that!” she proclaimed.

“What is that?” said Julia disdainfully, though not with rudeness.

“You see.  Isn’t it beautiful?  And isn’t it wonderful that it should not be broken?  If you think of the power of the waves here, that have beat to pieces almost everything ­rolled and ground and crushed everything that would break ­and this delicate little thing has lived through it.”

“There is a power of life in some delicate things,” said Tom.

“Power of fiddlestick!” said his sister.  “Miss Lothrop, I think this place is a terrible desert!”

“Then we will not stay here any longer,” said Lois.  “I am very fond of these little coves.”

“No, no, I mean Appledore generally.  It is the stupidest place I ever was in in my life.  There is nothing here.”

Lois looked at the lady with an expression of wondering compassion.

“Your experience does not agree with that of Miss Caruthers?” said Lenox.

“No,” said Lois.  “Let us take her to the place where you found me this morning; maybe she would like that.”

“We must go, I suppose,” groaned Julia, as Mr. Lenox helped her up over the rocks after the lighter-footed couple that preceded them.  “George, I believe you are in the way.”

“Thanks!” said the young man, laughing.  “But you will excuse me for continuing to be in the way.”

“I don’t know ­you see, it just sets Tom free to attend to her.  Look at him ­picking those purple irises ­as if iris did not grow anywhere else!  And now elderberry blossoms!  And he will give her lessons in botany, I shouldn’t wonder.  O, Tom’s a goose!”

“That disease is helpless,” said Lenox, laughing again.

“But George, it is madness!”

Mr. Lenox’s laugh rang out heartily at this.  His sovereign mistress was not altogether pleased.

“I do certainly consider ­and so do you, ­I do certainly consider unequal marriages to be a great misfortune to all concerned.”

“Certainly ­inequalities that cannot be made up.  For instance, too tall and too short do not match well together.  Or for the lady to be rich and the man to be poor; that is perilous.”

“Nonsense, George! don’t be ridiculous!  Height is nothing, and money is nothing; but family ­and breeding ­and habits ­”

“What is her family?” asked Mr. Lenox, pursing up his lips as if for a whistle.

“No family at all.  Just country people, living at Shampuashuh.”

“Don’t you know, the English middle class is the finest in the world?”

“No! no better than ours.”

“My dear, we have no middle class.”

“But what about the English middle class? why do you bring it up?”

“It owes its great qualities to its having the mixed blood of the higher and the lower.”

“Ridiculous!  What is that to us, if we have no middle class?  But don’t you see, George, what an unhappy thing it would be for Tom to marry this girl?”

Mr. Lenox whistled slightly, smiled, and pulled a purple iris blossom from a tuft growing in a little spot of wet ground.  He offered it to his disturbed companion.

“There is a country flower for you,” he observed.

But Miss Caruthers flung the flower impatiently away, and hastened her steps to catch up with her brother and Lois, who made better speed than she.  Mr. Lenox picked up the iris and followed, smiling again to himself.

They found Lois seated in her old place, where the gentlemen had seen her in the morning.  She rose at once to give the seat to Miss Caruthers, and herself took a less convenient one.  It was almost a new scene to Lois, that lay before them now.  The lights were from a different quarter; the colours those of the sinking day; the sea, from some inexplicable reason, was rolling higher than it had done six hours ago, and dashed on the rocks and on the reef in beautiful breakers, sending up now and then a tall jet of foam or a shower of spray.  The hazy mainland shore line was very indistinct under the bright sky and lowering sun; while every bit of west-looking rock, and every sail, and every combing billow was touched with warm hues or gilded with a sharp reflection.  The air was like the air nowhere but at the Isles of Shoals; with the sea’s salt strength and freshness, and at times a waft of perfumes from the land side.  Lois drank it with an inexpressible sense of exhilaration; while her eye went joyously roving from the lovely light on a sail, to the dancing foam of the breakers, to the colours of driftwood or seaweed or moss left wet and bare on the rocks, to the line of the distant ocean, or the soft vapoury racks of clouds floating over from the west.  She well-nigh forgot her companions altogether; who, however, were less absorbed.  Yet for a while they all sat silent, looking partly at Lois, partly at each other, partly no doubt at the leaping spray from the broken waves on the reef.  There was only the delicious sound of the splash and gurgle of waters ­the scream of a gull ­the breath of the air ­the chirrup of a few insects; all was wild stillness and freshness and pureness, except only that little group of four human beings.  And then, the puzzled vexation and perplexity in Tom’s face, and the impatient disgust in the face of his sister, were too much for Mr. Lenox’s sense of the humorous; and the silence was broken by a hearty burst of laughter, which naturally brought all eyes to himself.

“Pardon!” said the young gentleman.  “The delight in your face, Julia, was irresistible.”

“Delight!” she echoed.  “Miss Lothrop, do you find something here in which you take pleasure?”

Lois looked round.  “Yes,” she said simply.  “I find something everywhere to take pleasure in.”

“Even at Shampuashuh?”

“At Shampuashuh, of course.  That is my home.”

“But I never take pleasure in anything at home.  It is all such an old story.  Every day is just like any other day, and I know beforehand exactly how everything will be; and one dress is like another, and one party is like another.  I must go away from home to get any real pleasure.”

Lois wondered if she succeeded.

“That’s a nice look-out for you, George,” Caruthers remarked.

“I shall know how to make home so agreeable that she will not want to wander any more,” said the other.

“That is what the women do for the men, down our way,” said Lois, smiling.  She began to feel a little mischief stirring.

“What sort of pleasures do you find, or make, at home, Miss Lothrop?” Julia went on.  “You are very quiet, are you not?”

“There is always one’s work,” said Lois lightly.  She knew it would be in vain to tell her questioner the instances that came up in her memory; the first dish of ripe strawberries brought in to surprise her grandmother; the new potatoes uncommonly early; the fine yield of her raspberry bushes; the wonderful beauty of the early mornings in her garden; the rarer, sweeter beauty of the Bible reading and talk with old Mrs. Armadale; the triumphant afternoons on the shore, from which she and her sisters came back with great baskets of long clams; and countless other visions of home comfort and home peace, things accomplished and the fruit of them enjoyed.  Miss Caruthers could not understand all this; so Lois answered simply,

“There is always one’s work.”

“Work!  I hate work,” cried the other woman.  “What do you call work?”

“Everything that is to be done,” said Lois.  “Everything, except what we do for mere pleasure.  We keep no servant; my sisters and I do all that there is to do, in doors and out.”

“Out ­of ­doors!” cried Miss Caruthers.  “What do you mean?  You cannot do the farming?”

“No,” said Lois, smiling merrily; “no; not the farming.  That is done by men.  But the gardening I do.”

“Not seriously?”

“Very seriously.  If you will come and see us, I will give you some new potatoes of my planting.  I am rather proud of them.  I was just thinking of them.”

“Planting potatoes!” repeated the other lady, not too politely.  “Then that is the reason why you find it a pleasure to sit here and see those waves beat.”

The logical concatenation of this speech was not so apparent but that it touched all the risible nerves of the party; and Miss Caruthers could not understand why all three laughed so heartily.

“What did you expect when you came here?” asked Lois, still sparkling with fun.

“Just what I found!” returned the other rather grumbly.