Ralph Stock

“ I've heard something about that quarantine, and—I want you to have him; will you?”
“Yes,” said Meg, “I'll have him.”
“Thanks.”
There followed a long silence, during which Sprague felt a sudden and wild desire to snatch this chilly little mortal into his arms and kiss her into warmth. It was a novel sensation, experienced once—and only once—in his life before—at the age of seventeen. At that moment even “the work” faded into insignificance, a specter, grim and unalluring. He moved nearer to her in the sand, drawn by an irresistible impulse, and saw that she trembled. ”

“ Never had the white house on the cliff's summit undergone such a rigorous upheaval. Mr. Bettington wandered from room to room, peevishly demanding the whereabouts of his slippers, his tobacco pouch, or some other triviality without which his world would cease to revolve on its axis, to come at last upon his overzealous daughter, enveloped in an apron and a cloud of dust.
“They are the weirdest people,” Miss Holmes had confided to Sprague shortly after the inception of this crusade against disorder. “They give one olives and game for two pounds a week, and spring-clean in midsummer. ”

“ Sprague tossed a pebble down the stretch of wet sand.
“I'm not sure that I know,” he said deliberately, “unless it is that to me the white house is yours, the Haven mine, but the cove ours. Down here you can be you, and I can be I. I wanted us to be like that when we said good-by—that's all.”
Meg's laugh jarred on her own ears.
“What a queer man you are!” she observed. “No wonder you can write stories and plays and things.”
Sprague frowned into the darkness. ”