Jenny nodded understandingly. “I don’t believe I could live far away from the coast,” she commented. “I would feel as though a very important part of my life had been taken from me. I have always lived within sound of the sea, but come, I want to take you down to the Rocky Point.” The girls went again through the kitchen, and Jenny said to the dear little old lady who was sitting on the vine-hung side porch, busy, as always, with her sewing, “Grandma Sue, please let Lenora and me get the supper. We won’t be gone more than an hour and after that will be plenty of time.”
Lenora’s face brightened. “Oh, Mrs. Warner, how I wish you would let us. It would be such a treat to me. I love to cook, but it has been perfect ages since I have been allowed in a kitchen, and yours is so homey and different.”
Susan Warner nodded a pleased consent. “I reckon you may, if it’s what you’re wantin’ to do,” she said. Then she dropped her sewing in her lap, pushed her spectacles up among the lavender ribbons of her cap and gazed after the two girls as they went hand in hand down the path that led toward the Rocky Point. “It’s a pleasant sight,” the old woman thought, “Jenny having a friend of her own kind at last, and her, being a farmer’s gal, makes our darlin’ feel right at home wi’ her. Not one of the upstandin’ sort like Gwynette Poindexter-Jones.” There was seldom a hard expression on the loving old face, but there was one at that moment. The spectacles had been replaced and Susan Warner began to stab her needle into the blue patch she was putting on a pair of overalls in a manner that suggested that her thoughts were of no gentle nature.
“What right has one of ’em to be puttin’ on airs over the other of ’em? That’s what I’d like to be told. They bein’ flesh and blood sisters even if one of ’em has been fetched up grand. But I reckon there’s a justice in this world, an’ I can trust it to take keer o’ things.”
Having reached this more satisfactory state of mind, the old woman again glanced toward the point and saw the two girls climbing out on the highest rock. Jenny was carefully holding her friend’s hand and leading her to a wide boulder against which the waves had crashed in many a storm until they had cut out a hollow resembling a canopy-covered chair wide enough for two to sit comfortably.
It was low tide at that hour, and, when they were seated, Lenora exclaimed joyfully: “Oh, isn’t this the nicest place for confidences? Let’s tell each other a secret, shall we? That will make us intimate friends.”
Jenny smiled happily. “I don’t believe I have any secrets, that is, none of my own that I could share.” Miss Dearborn’s secret was the only one she knew.
“Then let’s tell our dearest desires,” Lenora suggested, “and I will begin.”
Then she laughingly confessed: “It will not take long to tell, however. I want to grow strong and well that I may become father’s housekeeper. It is desperately lonely for him with both Mother and me away, and yet, since his interests are all bound up in our Dakota farm, he cannot leave it, and so, you see, I must get well as soon as ever I can.”
Jenny nodded understandingly. “My dearest desire is to find a way by which I can help Grandpa Si buy Rocky Point farm. I have thought and thought, but, of course, just thinking doesn’t help much. There are ten acres in it, from the sea back to the highway, and then to the tall hedge you can see over there. That is where the Poindexter-Jones’ grounds begin, and in the other direction to where the canyon brook runs into the ocean.”