“Though mercy knows, nobody holds that against him. It was a compliment to the sex, I suppose, if he could get them. And Uncle Philly’s buried them all reverently and properly.”
They found the old man working at a carpenter’s bench out in the woodshed. His hair was gray and curly and his upper lip clean-shaven. Tommy said he looked like the pictures of Uncle Sam. He was tall and lean and stoop-shouldered, but his blue eyes were full of twinkles and he had the finest set of false teeth, Kit remarked soberly, that she’d ever seen, and the most Winsome smile.
“Winsome? Philly Weaver Winsome?” laughed Rebecca when she heard it. “Well, I must say, Kit, that is the best description yet. Winsome!”
“But he is,” Kit protested, “really winsome. He gave us each a drink from his well and showed Jean his Dutch tile stove and his grandfather’s clock. And he’s got the cutest old chest out in that side hall, Rebecca. I asked him how much he’d take for it, and he said no, he guessed he’d better not, though it was worth as much as two dollars and a half, but it had been his great-grandmother’s hope chest. Wasn’t that amusing?”
Armed with the key and waving goodbye to the old man at the top of the hill, they started down to the crossroads. Already they called the house home. It was so satisfying, Kit said, just to wander about the rooms and plan. There was one large southeast room that must be the living room. Back of this, opening out on a wide side porch, was the dining room. On the opposite side of the front hallway was a small room they could use for a study. Between it and the kitchen was a good-sized hallway lined with shelves and long handy drawers beneath them.
It was the kitchen and attic, though, that the girls lingered over most. The former extended across the entire back of the house and Doris said there was room enough to hold a dance in it.
“Where are you, Jeannie?” Kit called. “You’re missing thrills of discovery.”
But Jean was getting her own thrills. She had rolled up the legs of her blue jeans and ventured down the old winding cellar steps, groped around in the dark until she found the outside doors and removed the big wooden bar that held them. The stone steps outside were green with moss, and an indignant toad hopped back out of the sunlight when she threw open the doors.
“We’ll get the moldy smell out of the cellar in a few days,” she told the others, rolling up her sleeves and sitting down in the sunshine on the top step. “And there’s a furnace down there, too. It looks old and rusty, but it’s there.”
Kit stood with her hands clasped behind her back, looking up at the tall tapering pines. They were splendid old trees, towering as high as the house itself. Their branches spread out like great hoopskirts of green. Underneath was a thick silky carpet of russet needles, layer on layer from many seasons of growth. Beyond the limits of the garden lay the strip of white road, and across that came wide fields that seemed to fall in long waves to meet the river. On all sides they slipped away from the old house, their square borders outlined with the gray rock walls, each with its brave showing of springtime green, where every clambering vine had sent forth leafy tendrils, and even the moss had freshened up under the April showers.