roundabout
way through the garden, and the little path, behind the tool shed, and you
just follow it until you can't go any farther, and there's the bluff. I
haven't been down myself, but Dan says there's a little path you take to
the shore if you don't mind scrambling a bit."

Kit waved good-bye to her and went in search of the path. She found Dan,
the gardener, raking up leaves in the back garden. He was a plump
rosy-cheeked old Irishman, his face wrinkled like a winter pippin, and he
lifted his cap at her approach with a smile of frank curiosity and
approval.

A half-grown black retriever came bounding to meet her, his nose and
forepaws tipped with white.

"That's a welcome he's giving you you wouldn't have had if you'd been a
boy, Miss," Danny said, shrewdly. "I'm glad to meet you, and hope you'll
like it here."

Kit was stroking Sandy's silky curls. His real name he told her was
Lysander. Anything that the Dean had the naming of received the
benediction of ancient Greece, but Sandy, in his puppyhood, had managed to
acquire a happy diminutive.

"I don't see," Kit said, laughingly, "why you dreaded a boy coming. I know
some awfully nice boys back home, and there's one specially"--she paused
just a moment, before she added--"named Billie. He's kind of related to
us, because his grandfather married Cousin Roxy, and she's my father's
cousin. It's a little bit hard to figure it out, but still we're related,
and we're very, very good friends. I think he's just the kind of a boy the
Dean expected to see, but perhaps he'll get used to me. Do you think he
will?"

"Sure, it's like asking me could he get used to the sunshine," answered
Danny, gallantly.--"If you leave it to Sandy to find the shore, he'll take
you the quickest way."

CHAPTER IX

ALL SANDY'S FAULT

Everything was so different from the Connecticut verdure and underbrush.
Instead of the thick, lush growth which came from richly watered black
loam, here one found sand cherries and little dwarf willows and beeches
springing up from the sand. Tall sword grass waved almost like Cousin
Roxy's striped ribbon grass in the home garden, and wild sunflowers showed
like golden glow here and there.

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 upre