Ken and Felicia were just beginning to be really anxious, when Kirk tumbled in at the living-room door, with a headlong tale of enchanted hearthstones, ebony elephants, cinnamon toast, music that had made him cry, and most of all, of the benevolent, mysterious presence who had wrought all this.  Phil and Ken shook their heads, suggested that some supper would make Kirk feel better, and set a boundary limit of the orchard and meadow fence on his peregrinations.

“But I promised him I’d come again,” Kirk protested; “and I can find the way.  I must, because he says I can make music like that—­and he’s the only person who could show me how.”

Felicia extracted a more coherent story as she sat on the edge of Kirk’s bed later that evening.  She came downstairs sober and strangely elated, to electrify her brother by saying: 

“Something queer has happened to Kirk.  He’s too excited, but he’s simply shining.  And do you suppose it can possibly be true that he has music in him?  I mean real, extraordinary music, like—­Beethoven or somebody.”

But Ken roared so gleefully over the ridiculous idea of his small brother’s remotely resembling Beethoven, that Phil suddenly thought herself very silly, and lapsed into somewhat humiliated silence.

* * * * *

It was some time before the cares of a household permitted the Sturgises to do very much exploring.  One of their first expeditions, however, had been straight to the bay from the farm-house—­a scramble through wild, long-deserted pastures, an amazingly thick young alder grove, and finally out on the stony, salty water’s edge.  Here all was silver to the sea’s rim, where the bay met wider waters; in the opposite direction it narrowed till it was not more than a river, winding among salt flats and sudden rocky points until it lost itself in a maze of blue among the distant uplands.  The other shore was just beginning to be tenderly alight with April green, and Felicia caught her breath for very joy at the faint pink of distant maple boughs and the smell of spring and the sea.  A song-sparrow dropped a sudden, clear throatful of notes, and Kirk, too, caught the rapture of the spring and flung wide his arms in impartial welcome.

Ken had been poking down the shore and came back now, evidently with something to say.

“There’s the queerest little inlet down there,” he said, “with a tide eddy that runs into it.  And there’s an old motor-boat hove way up on the rocks in there among the bushes.”

“What about it?” Felicia asked.

“I merely wished it were ours.”

“Naturally it’s some one else’s.”

“He takes mighty poor care of it, then.  The engine’s all rusted up, and there’s a hole stove in the bottom.”

“Then we shouldn’t want it.”

“It could be fixed,” Ken murmured; “easily.  I examined it.”

He stared out at the misty bay’s end, thinking, somehow, of the Celestine, which he had not forgotten in his anxieties as a householder.