She stood up and, giving a long “Woo-ooh!” through her hands to the turbulent young ones, led me back over the dunes to the green edge of the woods.
“There,” she said, pointing over the tree-tops to the town that nestled at the edge of the encircled bay, “do you see five pine-trees standing up higher than all the others? That is the place.”
I saw below me a mass of scrubby oaks and stunted pines, which wore out to a thin edge on the shore where the fishing-village huddled. The bright white paint of the cottages, with the sun at their backs, picked them out distinctly from the blue bay beyond them, and one house, larger than any of the others, thrust its sloping roof into prominence beside a row of pines.
“That!” I exclaimed. “But how large it is—for only my husband and myself! We would rattle around in it. We haven’t enough furniture!”
I was alarmed at the expansive turn of Ruth’s imagination. Even if you have put yourself in the power of a friend’s advice, or perhaps just because of that, you are not ready to admit that she, with one slash of unprejudiced judgment, has cut the knot which you have been patiently trying to untangle.
“Furniture!” scoffed Ruth. “If that is all that is worrying you—There is more furniture in that house than any other house on Cape Cod. That is a captain’s place, old Captain Jeremiah Hawes, and he brought home fine mahogany from wherever he dropped anchor. In his day they sailed to England for their Chippendale and to China for a set of dishes.”
“What good would that do me?”
“You don’t seem to understand,” Ruth explained patiently; “it all goes together. There is hardly a house sold in Star Harbor but what the furniture is included in the deal. You get whatever the house contains, when you buy it.”
We were retracing the path through the woods by which we had entered the dunes earlier in the day. The children ran before us, playing wood-tag from tree to tree, exploring “fairy circles,” and stopping from time to time to let us catch up with them, when they would drop completely out of sight among the blueberry-bushes. These grew so thick at our feet that you could pull the berries off by the handful and munch them as you strolled along.
“Tell me more about the house,” I begged. My mouth was full of blueberries, but my mind was full of plans.