They parted a moment later, Ruth to go to her cottage on the slope, Pearl to her home on the water front, and Betty to the big summer cottage that tops the hill.
As Ruth lay in her bed by the window, looking out over the bay that night, she felt that the cozy and comfortable little world she knew, the bay, the cluster of little islands, the all enclosing sea, had suddenly become greatly agitated.
“It’s as if a great storm had come sweeping down upon us,” she told herself.
“Mystery, thrills, adventure,” she said a moment later. “I have always longed for these, but now they have begun to come I—I somehow feel that I should like to put out my two hands and push them away.”
With that she fell asleep.
CHAPTER V
THREE GRAY WITCHES
The next afternoon Pearl Bracket went fishing. She felt the need of an opportunity for quiet thought. The events of the past few days had stirred her to the very depths. A quiet, dreamy girl, she was given to sitting across the prow of her brother’s fishing boat or the stern of her ancient dory as it drifted on a placid bay. But this day only Witches Cove would do.
To this imaginative girl Witches Cove had ever been a haunting place of many mysteries. A deep dark pool on three sides by the darkest of firs and hemlocks, on the north of the island where no sunbeams ever fell, it had always cast a spell of enchantment about her.
There, when the tide was coming in, water rushed over half submerged rocks to go booming against the granite wall, then to return murmuring and whispering of many things.
Pearl sat in the stern of her dory on this particular afternoon and recalled all the strange tales that had been woven about the cove.