“Good, that let’s me out.” He looked about restlessly. “Well, I don’t know about you-­all, but I-­all am going off and find that Toni Lansing. Mm-­mmm! If she’s anywhere in Sconset, she must be along the beach taking the sun—and probably disappointed as all hell because nobody comes to find her. Want to join me, anyone?”

“I do,” Billie said.

“Okay, if my old lady doesn’t object. Or your old man.”

“My old man,” Billie said. “Funny, I never thought of him that way.”

As Grandin watched them go, his eye was caught by another figure trudging in lonely fashion through the sand a few hundred feet back from the beach, about midway between the sea and the bluff. It was a man in white, walking parallel to the beach, and he appeared to be plodding doggedly, leaning slightly forward, as if he had come a long way and still had far to go. “Pete,” he called out, “who’s that?”

“The Coast Guard,” Pete said. “He just passed along here behind us, few minutes ago. They patrol the island day and night. See that black post where he’s stopping at now? There’s a time clock there and he punches it every hour. Oh, you’ll see him—or one of the others—going by here good many times a day.”

“Lonely job, I should imagine.”

“Not nearly so lonely as at night,” Pete said. “Still, they have a police dog for company, then. I suppose you know that since the war, civilians aren’t allowed on the beach at night?”

“I didn’t, no.”

“It’s something to keep in mind. After dark, nobody can come within five hundred yards of the beach. If they do and get caught, there’s an awful fine. But the fine’s nothing compared to what those dogs’ll do to you.”

“Is that the Coast Guard station far down the beach?”

“Yeah, down near Tom Nevershead. Good many men live there.”

“Well, that takes care of that,” Mrs. Howard said. “Bill and I planned to spend the evening on the beach, come the night of the full moon. Really, they ought to tell you these things in the catalogue.”

Grandin watched the figure of the Coast Guard disappearing slowly over the reaches of sand, his white uniform like a tiny diminishing spark of light. It was a melancholy job, to say the least, that patrol; and the fact that the coast guardsman’s duties brought him so many times a day past the sun bathers enjoying their leisure couldn’t have made the job any easier to take.

Mr. Howard and Billie came hurrying back. They ran stamping into the group, both of them breathless.

“We saw her,” Billie gasped, “we saw her! She’s sitting down there just like—why, just like you and I!”

“No!” mocked Sarah Howard.

“Mighty worth looking at though, Mama.”