“Do you know the Dean?” Kit asked, sitting down on the doorstep beside her. “He lives up in the big house on the bluff, where the pine and maples are.”
The old woman shook her head placidly. “I not go up that bluff in forty-eight years.”
Kit’s eyes widened with quick interest. Just then a girl a little older than herself came out of the kitchen door. Two pigtails of straight brown hair hung to her shoulders, and her dress was gypsy-like. She looked at Kit with quiet, steady scrutiny, and then questioningly over at the boys. But Kit herself relieved the tension.
“Hi,” she said. “I think you’ve got an awfully nice place down here. I like it because it looks old like our houses back home. All the other places I’ve seen since I came out here have looked so newly-painted.”
“This isn’t new,” the girl told her slowly. “This place belonged to my grandfather’s father, Charles Flambeau. There were Indians around here then. Most of them Ojibways.”
Kit’s curiosity was aroused by this entirely new field of adventure to be uncovered. The wonderful old grandmother, basking in the sun with memories of the past. The strong, tanned boys working at the nets, the flock of dark-skinned youngsters, and the girl, Jeannette, whom she was to know so well before her stay in Delphi was over.
She hurried back, eager to ask questions about the Flambeaus, and found herself late for breakfast the very first morning she was there. The Dean’s face was a study as she entered, and Della’s fingers fluttered nervously over the coffee pot and cups. Kit was out of breath, and so full of excitement that she did not even notice the air was chill.
“I’ve had a perfectly wonderful time,” she began. “No coffee, Aunt Della, please. It’s all Sandy’s fault. I just wanted to run down the bluff to the shore, and he led me way around that headland to the quaintest old house, half-sunken in the sand, and I got acquainted with the old grandmother and Jeannette. The boys and the little kids seemed half-scared to death at the sight of me, and so I didn’t bother to get acquainted with them yet.”
The Dean looked up at her over his glasses with a quizzical expression, and Della fairly caught her breath.
“The Flambeaus on the shore, my dear?” she asked. “Those half-breed French Canadians?”