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Rh mounted from between the files of pearl-mouthed conch shells, need even a touch of restoration. But the captain worked slowly, painting them a vivid azure.

Tapping two brushes against an axe-helve, he had begun to spatter thick dots of black and white, when a voice calling made his tall frame straighten and turn toward the gate. "Good-morning, Captain Christy!"

Against the pickets leaned the slim body of a girl, and over them, like a hardy, trim-poised flower, her bare head,—a sun-browned face, gentle and serious, but lighted with merry eyes, and breezily crowned with willful brown hair.

"Mornin', Joyce," replied the captain, fixing on her a whimsical look, at once benevolent and stern.

"What are you doing that for?" she asked reproachfully, and pointed at the brushes and the bedaubed axe-helve. In guilty silence the captain laid them athwart his paint-bucket, and approached the gate.

"Oh, nothin'," he answered, looking paternally down at her face of mischief, and then