k."

"How you do run on!" she said. "You wait and find out the way you have
to wash dishes and all. We'll see what we see, my fine young whiffet."

"Say, James J. Jerusalem but I've got a fine idea. I know what we'll
call the tea-room--'The T Room'--see, not spelling out the T. Great,
eh?"

CHAPTER V

It was May in Arcady, and those young-hearted old lovers, Mr. and Mrs.
Seth Appleby, were almost ready to open the tea-room. They had leased
for a term of two years an ancient and weathered house on the gravel
cliffs of Grimsby Head. From the cliffs the ocean seemed more sweepingly
vast than when beheld from the beach, and the plain of it was colored
like a pearly shell. To the other side of their dream-house were moors
that might have been transplanted from Devon, rolling uplands covered
with wiry grass that was springy to the feet, dappled with lichens which
gave to the spacious land its lovely splashes of color--rose and green
and sulphur and quiet gray.

It was a lonely countryside; the nearest signs of human life were a
church gauntly silhouetted on the hill above Grimsby Center, two miles
away, and a life-saving station, squat and sand-colored, slapped down in
a hollow of the cliffs. But near the Applebys' door ran the State road,
black and oily and smooth, on which, even at the beginning of the summer
season, passed a procession of motors from Boston and Brockton, Newport
and New York, all of them unquestionably filled with people who would
surely discover that they were famished for tea and preserves and
tremendous quantities of sandwiches, as soon as Father and Mother hung
out the sign, "The T Room."

They would open in a day or two, now, when Mother had finished the livid
chintz window-curtains. The service-room was already crammed with chairs
and tables till it resembled a furniture-store. A maid was established,
a Cape Verde Portygee girl from Mashpee. All day long Father had been
copying the menu upon the florid cards which he had bought from a
bankrupt Jersey City printer--thick gilt-edged cards embossed with
forget-me-nots in colors which hadn't quite registered.

From their upper rooms, in which Mother had arranged the furniture to
make the new home resemble their New York flat, the Applebys came
happily down-stairs for the sunset. They were still excited at having
country and sea at their door; still felt that all life would be one
perpetual vacation. Every day now they would have the wild