“That’s a welcome he’s giving you you wouldn’t have had if you’d been a boy, Miss,” Dan said shrewdly. “I’m glad to meet you and hope you’ll like it here.”
Kit was stroking Sandy’s head. His real name, Dan told her, was Lysander. Anything that the Dean had the naming of received the benediction of ancient Greece, but Sandy, in his puppyhood, had managed to acquire a happy nickname.
“I don’t see,” Kit said laughing, “why you dreaded a boy coming. I know some awfully nice boys back home, and there’s one especially, named Buzzy. He’s out West now. I think he’s just the kind of a boy the Dean expected to see, but perhaps he’ll get used to me. Do you think he will?”
“Sure he will,” answered Dan. “If you leave it to Sandy to find the shore, he’ll take you the quickest way.”
Everything was so different from the Connecticut countryside. Instead of the thick, lush growth which came from richly watered black loam, here one found sand cherries and dwarf willows and beeches springing up from the sand. Tall sword grass waved almost like Becky’s striped ribbon grass in her home garden, and wild sunflowers showed like golden glow here and there.
The beach was level and rockless, different entirely from the Eastern Atlantic shores, but the sand was beautifully white and fine, and there were great weatherbeaten, wave-washed boulders lying half-buried in the sand, also trunks of trees, their roots sticking out grotesquely like the heads of strange animals. Kit thought to herself how the Dean might have added them with profit to his prehistoric collection. There was no glimpse or hint of the town to be seen down here. Not even a boathouse, only one long pier. About a mile and a half from shore was a lighthouse, and farther out a dark freighter showed in perfect outline against the blueness of the morning sky.
Kit followed Sandy’s lead, hardly realizing the distance she was covering, until he suddenly disappeared behind a headland. When she rounded it, she saw a cottage built close under the shelter of the bluff. The sand drifted like snow halfway up to its windows. It had been painted red once, but now its old clapboards were the color of sorrel, and weatherbeaten and wave-washed like the boulders. There were fish nets drying on tall staples driven in behind a couple of overturned rowboats, and at that first glimpse it seemed to her as if there were children everywhere. Four strong boys from fourteen to eighteen worked over the nets, mending them. Around the back door there were four or five more, and sitting in the sunlight in a low rocking chair was an old woman.
Sandy seemed to greet them as old acquaintances, so Kit called good morning in her friendly way. The boys eyed her, and all of the children scurried like a flock of startled chickens as she came up the boardwalk to the kitchen door, but the old grandmother kept serenely on paring potatoes, calm-eyed and unembarrassed.
“How do you do?” said Kit, and she smiled. “I’m Dean Peabody’s grandniece. I just came here yesterday, and Sandy brought me here this morning. I didn’t know where he was going, but he seemed to know the way.”
The old woman’s brown eyes followed the movement of the dog. “He’s very fine, that dog,” she said deliberately. “He comes very often, I’ve known him since he was un petit chien, very small pup—so big.” She measured with her hand from the ground.