“Let us hope it will be! If the first inmates are peace and good will. Peace and good will,” he repeated, gravely. Then his accustomed gayety replaced his seriousness and he waved his hand toward the entrance, saying:
“Queen Erminie, enter in and possess your kingdom! Your maids of honor with you!”
“My heart!” cried Alfaretta, following her hostess, like a girl in a dream. “I thought ’twould be just another up-mounting sort of place, not near so nice as Deerhurst or the Towers, but it’s splendid more ’n they are, either one or both together.”
“Wonderful, what money can do in this land of the free!” remarked Herbert, critically estimating the establishment. “Think of a man having his own electric light plant away up here! Why, if it weren’t for the mountains yonder one could fancy this is Newport or Long Branch.”
“Without the sea, Bert. Even money can’t bring the sea to the mountain-tops,” said Helena, though her own face was aglow with admiration.
“It can do the next best thing to it. Look yonder,” said Monty, pointing where a glimmer of sunset-tinted water showed through a hedge of trees.
“Let’s go there. It certainly is water,” urged Jim Barlow.
“Well, Leslie told me there was a strange waterfall near San Leon and I suppose the same money has pressed that into service. To think! That ‘Railroad Boss’ earned his first quarter selling papers on the train! He was talking about the ‘cabin’ as we came along. It had two rooms and he lived in it alone with his mother. By his talk they hadn’t always been so poor and she belonged to an old family, as ‘families go in America.’ That was the way he put it, and it was his ambition to see his mother able to take ‘the place where she belonged.’ That’s how he began; and now, look at this!”
All the young people had now gathered around the pond, or lake, that had been made in a natural basin on the mountain side, for thinking that their host and hostess would better like to enter their new home with no strangers about them, Dorothy had suggested:
“Let’s follow the boys! Jim’s arm ought to be looked after, first thing, and I’ll remind him of it. He’d no business to come on horseback all that long way, but he never would take care of himself.”