“It’s the sweetest, prettiest place I ever saw or imagined,” said Anne delightedly. “It looks like a bit out of a story book or a dream.”
The house was a low-eaved structure built of undressed blocks of red Island sandstone, with a little peaked roof out of which peered two dormer windows, with quaint wooden hoods over them, and two great chimneys. The whole house was covered with a luxuriant growth of ivy, finding easy foothold on the rough stonework and turned by autumn frosts to most beautiful bronze and wine-red tints.
Before the house was an oblong garden into which the lane gate where the girls were standing opened. The house bounded it on one side; on the three others it was enclosed by an old stone dyke, so overgrown with moss and grass and ferns that it looked like a high, green bank. On the right and left the tall, dark spruces spread their palm-like branches over it; but below it was a little meadow, green with clover aftermath, sloping down to the blue loop of the Grafton River. No other house or clearing was in sight . . . nothing but hills and valleys covered with feathery young firs.
“I wonder what sort of a person Miss Lewis is,” speculated Diana as they opened the gate into the garden. “They say she is very peculiar.”
“She’ll be interesting then,” said Anne decidedly. “Peculiar people are always that at least, whatever else they are or are not. Didn’t I tell you we would come to an enchanted palace? I knew the elves hadn’t woven magic over that lane for nothing.”
“But Miss Lavendar Lewis is hardly a spellbound princess,” laughed Diana. “She’s an old maid . . . she’s forty-five and quite gray, I’ve heard.”
“Oh, that’s only part of the spell,” asserted Anne confidently. “At heart she’s young and beautiful still . . . and if we only knew how to unloose the spell she would step forth radiant and fair again. But we don’t know how . . . it’s always and only the prince who knows that . . . and Miss Lavendar’s prince hasn’t come yet. Perhaps some fatal mischance has befallen him . . . though that’s against the law of all fairy tales.”
“I’m afraid he came long ago and went away again,” said Diana. “They say she used to be engaged to Stephen Irving . . . Paul’s father . . . when they were young. But they quarreled and parted.”
“Hush,” warned Anne. “The door is open.”
The girls paused in the porch under the tendrils of ivy and knocked at the open door. There was a patter of steps inside and a rather odd little personage presented herself . . . a girl of about fourteen, with a freckled face, a snub nose, a mouth so wide that it did really seem as if it stretched “from ear to ear,” and two long braids of fair hair tied with two enormous bows of blue ribbon.