Kissing him again, Rilla went to her snug little room over the kitchen, and Shags followed, for he always slept just outside her closed door.
Rilla did not light the kerosene lamp that stood on the small table. The moon was rising and she liked its light best. For a moment she stood at the open window, facing the town, which in the fall and winter was so dark and quiet in the evening, but in summer, when the city people were in their cabins on the point, it was pulsing with life, color and music. Rilla never visited the town in summer. She was then practically a prisoner on the small rocky island. For a long time she stood watching the waves that lifted silvery crests in the moonlight. “I wonder who my dad was,” she thought, as she had many times before. “I wonder why he never came for me, after my girl-mother died.” Forgotten was the box in Treasure Cave.
Many had been the moods of Rilla that day, but when she had undressed in the moonlight she knelt, not by the bedside, but facing the window. Looking up toward the peaceful, starry sky, she whispered softly, “God in Heaven, bless my grand-dad, and—and my father—who never came for me. Amen.”
Soon she was asleep, little dreaming that the next day was to bring into her hitherto quiet and uneventful life her first real adventure.
CHAPTER II.
A GIFT FROM THE SEA.
Sunrise and the memory of the treasure box came at the same time. Rilla was dressed in a twinkling. She did not even stop to peer into the bit of broken mirror which Mrs. Sol Dexter had given her, hoping that with it would go the proverbial seven years of bad luck. Mrs. Sol Dexter kept the general store and postoffice in the fishing village of Tunkett.
She was absolutely honest, was Mrs. Sol, but not inclined to be generous. If the scales tipped one cranberry too many, out came that cranberry! She had never before been known to give anything away, but something which might bring bad luck she had been willing to part with.
It had been a happy day for Rilla, that one, when for the first time she had acquired a real mirror.
It was, of course, after the summer season, or she would not have been in town at all. And on that same day her grand-dad had given her a whole quarter to spend just as she wished and she had asked Mrs. Sol Dexter for two hair ribbons, one to match the sunrise and one like the green in the hollow of a wave just before it turns over when the sun is shining on it.
“Queerest gal, that!” Mrs. Dexter confided to her husband, Cap’n Sol, the next time he came in from one of his sea “v’yages.”