The two friends crossed the broad white beach toward the little stone house of the light-keeper, who sat in the doorway, having spent the morning watching their sail cross over from Pelican reef, tacking lazily east and west--an event of more than enough importance in his isolated life to have kept him there, gazing and contented, all day. Behind the broad shoulders of swarthy Pedro stood a little figure clothed in black; and as the man lifted himself lazily at last and came down to meet them, and his wife stepped briskly forward, they saw that the third person was a nun--a large-eyed, fragile little creature, promptly introduced by Melvyna, the keeper's wife, as "Sister St. Luke." For the keeper's wife, in spite of her black eyes, was not a Minorcan at all; not even a southerner. Melvyna Sawyer was born in Vermont, and, by one of the strange chances of this vast, many-raced, motley country of ours, she had travelled south as nurse, and a very good, energetic nurse too, albeit somewhat sharp-voiced, to a delicate young wife, who had died in the sunny land, as so many of them die; the sun, with all his good will and with all his shining, not being able to undo in three months the work of long years of the snows and the bleak east winds of New England.