It was some time before the cares of a household permitted the Sturgises to do very much exploring. One of their first expeditions, however, had been straight to the bay from the farm-house--a scramble through wild, long-deserted pastures, an amazingly thick young alder grove, and finally out on the stony, salty water's edge. Here all was silver to the sea's rim, where the bay met wider waters; in the opposite direction it narrowed till it was not more than a river, winding among salt flats and sudden rocky points until it lost itself in a maze of blue among the distant uplands. The other shore was just beginning to be tenderly alight with April green, and Felicia caught her breath for very joy at the faint pink of distant maple boughs and the smell of spring and the sea. A song-sparrow dropped a sudden, clear throatful of notes, and Kirk, too, caught the rapture of the spring and flung wide his arms in impartial welcome.
Ken had been poking down the shore and came back now, evidently with something to say.
"There's the queerest little inlet down there," he said, "with a tide eddy that runs into it. And there's an old motor-boat hove way up on the rocks in there among the bushes."
"What about it?" Felicia asked.
"I merely wished it were ours."
"Naturally it's some one else's."
"He takes mighty poor care of it, then. The engine's all rusted up, and there's a hole stove in the bottom."
"Then we shouldn't want it."
"It could be fixed," Ken murmured; "easily. I examined it."
He stared out at the misty bay's end, thinking, somehow, of the Celestine, which he had not forgotten in his anxieties as a householder.