The beach was level and rockless, different entirely from the Eastern Atlantic shores, but the sand was beautifully white and fine, and there were great weather-beaten, wave-washed boulders lying half buried in the sand, also trunks of trees, their roots uprearing grotesquely like strange heads of animals.  Kit thought whimsically how the Dean might have added them with profit to his prehistoric collection.  There was no glimpse or hint of the town to be seen down here.  Not even a boat house, only one long pier.  About a mile and a half from shore was a lightship, and farther out a white steamer showed in perfect outline against the blueness of the morning sky.

Kit followed Sandy’s lead, hardly realizing the distance she was covering, until he suddenly disappeared behind a nosing headland.  When she rounded it, she saw a cottage built close under the shelter of the bluff.  The sand drifted like snow half-way up to its windows.  It had been painted red once, but now its old clapboards were the color of sorrel, and weather-beaten and wave-washed like the boulders.  There were fish nets drying on tall staples driven in behind a couple of overturned rowboats, and at that first glimpse it seemed to her as if there were children everywhere.  Four stalwart boys from fourteen to eighteen worked over the nets, mending them; around the back door there were four or five more, and sitting in the sunlight in a low rocking-chair was an old woman as picturesque as some ancient sibyl.

Sandy seemed to greet them as old acquaintances, so Kit called good-morning in good old Yankee fashion.  The boys eyed her, somewhat askance, and all of the children scurried like a flock of startled chickens as she came up the boardwalk to the kitchen door, but the old grandmother kept serenely on paring potatoes, calm-eyed and unembarrassed.

“How do you do?” said Kit, smilingly.  “I’m Dean Peabody’s grandniece.  I just came west yesterday, and Sandy brought me here this morning.  I didn’t know where he was going, but he seemed to know the way.”

The old woman’s brown eyes followed the movement of the dog.

“He ver’ fine, that dog,” she said, deliberately.  “He come ver’ often.  I know him since he is un petit chien, ver’ small pup—­so beeg.”  She measured with her hand from the ground.

“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 year.”

Kit’s eyes widened with quick interest.  Just then a girl a little older than herself came out of the kitchen door.  Two long braids of straight brown hair hung over her shoulders, and her dress was slouchy and gypsy-like.  She looked at Kit with quiet, steady scrutiny, and then questioningly over at the boys.  But Kit herself relieved the tension.