"If you girls feel like coming down, you can take the short cut through the woods. Like enough you'll find some blood root out by now and saxifrage too. Don't be like Jean, though. The other day she came up from the brook and said she'd found a calla lily, and it was just skunk cabbage."
So the girls took the short cut through the woods. They were just beginning to show signs of spring. The trees were bare, but under the dry leaves they found the new life springing. It was all new and interesting to them. Down at the Cove they had been in a beautiful part of Long Island but it was all restricted property. Here the woods and meadows spread for miles on every hand. Every pasture bar seemed to invite one to climb over it and explore the "Beyond," as Doris called it. And where the woods ended in rocky pastures and wide spreading fields, they came out to a spot where they overlooked the Mansion House and its grounds.
Cousin Roxana and Mrs. Robbins were there before them. The side door stood hospitably open, and Ella Lou was hitched to the post just as though she belonged there. It was a curiously interesting old place. First of all, a rock wall enclosed the grounds, with rock columns at the two entrance gates. These were wide, for the drive entered on one side, wound around the house, and came out on the other road, as the house stood at a corner.
The house itself looked like a glorified farmhouse. It wasn't at all like a bungalow, Kit declared. In fact it was hard to place it in the history of architecture.
"I think perhaps it started out to be Mid-Victorian with that general squareness and the veranda," said Mrs. Robbins.
"That isn't Mid-Victorian, Mother darling," Jean interposed. "That's the Reaction Period in New England. First of all none of the Puritan women had any time to sit out on porches or verandas, so all the houses were made plain faced. Then after the war they began to turn their minds to lighter things, so they stuck a cupola up here, and tacked on a little porch there, and gave the windows fancy eyebrows, and little scalloped wooden lace ruffles along the edges of the eaves. Isn't that so, Cousin Roxy?"
"Well, I declare, Jeanie," laughed Miss Robbins, "maybe you're right. I'd say, though, it was mostly a hankering after titivation. I don't set much store by it myself, so long as I've got plenty of flowering bushes 'round a house, and climbing vines. That makes me think, you've got a sight of them here, flowering quince and almond, and 'pinies,' and all sorts of hardy annuals. There used to be a big border of them, I remember, at the back of the house, and behind it was an old-fashioned rose garden."
"A rose garden!" Kit and Helen gasped.
"Wish I had my sun dial under my arm this minute," added Jean. "Come on, girls."
Back they went to find it, and after hunting diligently through hazel bushes and upspringing weeds, they found where one terrace dipped into a sunken space walled in once upon a time, though now the tumbled gray rocks had half fallen down, and some were sunken in the earth. But still they found some old rose canes, and several large bushes that looked hopeful. There was a flagged walk with myrtle growing up between the stones, and a tumble-down arbor that Doris declared looked exactly like a shipwrecked pilot house off some boat.