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“But you didn’t like me,” said Jane, before she thought.

“Not like you! Who told you that?”

“Grandmother.” She had not been forbidden to mention grandmother’s name to him.

“The old …” dad checked himself. A mask seemed to fall over his face.

“Let us not forget we are house-hunting, Jane,” he said coolly.

For a little while Jane felt no interest in house-hunting. She didn’t know what to believe or whom to believe. She thought dad liked her now … but did he? Perhaps he was just pretending. Then she remembered how he had kissed her.

“He does like me now,” she thought. “Perhaps he didn’t like me when I was born but I know he does now.” And she was happy again.

House-hunting, Jane decided, was jolly. Perhaps it was really more the pleasure of the driving and talking and being silent with dad that was jolly, for most of the houses on dad’s list were not interesting. The first house they looked at was too big; the second was too small.

“After all, we must have room to swing the cat,” said dad.

“Have you a cat?” demanded Jane.

“No. But we can get one if you like. I hear the kitten crop is tops this year. Do you like cats?”

“Yes.”

“Then we’ll have a bushel of them.”

“No,” said Jane, “two.”

“And a dog. I don’t know how you feel about dogs, Jane, but if you’re going to have a cat, I must have a dog. I haven’t had a dog since …”

He stopped short again, and again Jane had the feeling that he had been just on the point of saying something she wanted very much to hear.

The third house looked attractive. It was just at the turn of a wooded road dappled with sunshine through the trees. But on inspection it proved hopeless. The floors were cut and warped and slanted in all directions. The doors didn’t hang right. The windows wouldn’t open. There was no pantry.

There was too much gingerbread about the fourth house, dad said, and neither of them looked twice at the fifth … a dingy, square, unpainted building with a litter of rusty cans, old pails, fruit baskets, rags and rubbish all over its yard.

“The next on my list is the old Jones house,” said dad.

It was not so easy to find the old Jones house. The new Jones house fronted the road boldly, but you had to go past it and away down a deep-rutted, neglected lane to find the old one. You could see the gulf from the kitchen window. But it was too big and both dad and Jane felt that the view of the back of the Jones barns and pig-sty was not inspiring. So they bounced up the lane again, feeling a little dashed.

The seventh house seemed to be all a house should be. It was a small bungalow, new and white, with a red roof and dormer windows. The yard was trim though treeless; there were a pantry and a nice cellar and good floors. And it had a wonderful view of the gulf.

Dad looked at Jane.

“Do you sense any magic about this, my Jane?”

“Do YOU?” challenged Jane.

Dad shook his head.

“Absolutely none. And, as magic is indispensable, no can do.”

They drove away, leaving the man who owned the house wondering who them two lunatics were. What on earth was magic? He must see the carpenter who had built the house and find out why he hadn’t put any in it.

Two more houses were impossible.

“I suppose we’re a pair of fools, Jane. We’ve looked at all the houses I’ve heard of that are for sale … and what’s to be done now? Go back and eat our words and buy the bungalow?”

“Let’s ask this man who is coming along the road if he knows of any house we haven’t seen,” said Jane composedly.

“The Jimmy Johns have one, I hear,” said the man. “Over at Lantern Hill. The house their Aunt Matilda Jollie lived in. There’s some of her furniture in it, too, I hear. You’d likely git it reasonable if you jewed him down a bit. It’s two miles to Lantern Hill and you go by Queen’s Shore.”

The Jimmy Johns and a Lantern Hill and an Aunt Matilda Jollie! Jane’s thumbs pricked. Magic was in the offing.

Jane saw the house first … at least she saw the upstairs window in its gable end winking at her over the top of a hill. But they had to drive around the hill and up a winding lane between two dikes, with little ferns growing out of the stones and young spruces starting up along them at intervals.

And then, right before them, was the house … THEIR house!

“Dear, don’t let your eyes pop quite out of your head,” warned dad.

It squatted right against a little steep hill whose toes were lost in bracken. It was small … you could have put half a dozen of it inside 60 Gay. It had a garden, with a stone dike at the lower end of it to keep it from sliding down the hill, a paling and a gate, with two tall white birches leaning over it, and a flat-stone walk up to the only door, which had eight small panes of glass in its upper half. The door was locked but they could see in at the windows. There was a good-sized room on one side of the door, stairs going up right in front of it, and two small rooms on the other side whose windows looked right into the side of the hill where ferns grew as high as your waist, and there were stones lying about covered with velvet green moss.

There was a bandy-legged old cook-stove in the kitchen, a table and some chairs. And a dear little glass-paned cupboard in the corner fastened with a wooden button.

On one side of the house was a clover field and on the other a maple grove, sprinkled with firs and spruces, and separated from the house lot by an old, lichen-covered board fence. There was an apple-tree in the corner of the yard, with pink petals falling softly, and a clump of old spruces outside the garden gate.

“I like the pattern of this place,” said Jane.

“Do you suppose it’s possible that the view goes with the house?” said dad.

Jane had been so taken up with her house that she had not looked at the view at all. Now she turned her eyes on it and lost her breath over it. Never, never had she seen … had she dreamed anything so wonderful.

Lantern Hill was at the apex of a triangle of land which had the gulf for its base and Queen’s Harbour for one of its sides. There were silver and lilac sand-dunes between them and the sea, extending into a bar across the harbour where great, splendid, blue and white waves were racing to the long sun-washed shore. Across the channel a white lighthouse stood up against the sky and on the other side of the harbour were the shadowy crests of purple hills that dreamed with their arms around each other. And over it all the indefinable charm of a Prince Edward Island landscape.

Just below Lantern Hill, skirted by spruce barrens on the harbour side and a pasture field on the other, was a little pond … absolutely the bluest thing that Jane had ever seen.

“Now, that is my idea of a pond,” said dad.

Jane said nothing at first. She could only look. She had never been there before but it seemed as if she had known it all her life. The song the sea-wind was singing was music native to her ears. She had always wanted to “belong” somewhere and she belonged here. At last she had a feeling of home.

“Well, what about it?” said dad.

Jane was so sure the house was listening that she shook her finger at him.

“Sh … sh,” she said.

“Let’s go down to the shore and talk it over,” said dad.

It was about fifteen minutes’ walk to the outside shore. They sat down on the bone-white body of an old tree that had drifted from heaven knew where. The snapping salty breeze whipped their faces; the surf creamed along the shore; the wee sand-peeps flitted fearlessly past them. “How clean salt air is!” thought Jane.

“Jane, I have a suspicion that the roof leaks.”

“You can put some shingles on it.”

“There’s a lot of burdocks in the yard.”

“We can root them out.”

“The house may have once been white …”

“It can be white again.”

“The paint on the front door is blistered.”

“Paint doesn’t cost very much, does it?”

“The shutters are broken.”

“Let’s fix them.”

“The plaster is cracked.”

“We can paper over it.”

“Who knows if there’s a pantry, Jane?”

“There are shelves in one of the little rooms on the right. I can use that for a pantry. The other little room would do you for a study. You’d have to have some place to write, wouldn’t you?”

“She’s got it all planned out,” dad told the Altantic. But added, “That big maple wood is a likely place for owls.”

“Who’s afraid of owls?”

“And what about magic, my Jane?”

Magic! Why, the place was simply jammed with magic. You were falling over magic. Dad knew that. He was only talking for the sake of talking. When they went back Jane sat down on the big red sandstone slab which served as a doorstep, while dad went through the maple wood by a little twisted path the cows had made to see Jimmy John—otherwise Mr J. J. Garland. The Garland house could be seen peeping around the corner of the maples—a snug, butter-coloured farmhouse decently dressed in trees.

Jimmy John came back with dad, a little fat man with twinkling grey eyes. He hadn’t been able to find the key but they had seen the ground floor and he told them there were three rooms upstairs with a spool bed in one of them and a closet in each of them.

“And a boot-shelf under the stairs.”

They stood on the stone walk and looked at the house.

“What are you going to do with me?” said the house as plainly as ever a house spoke.

“What is your price?” said dad.

“Four hundred with the furniture thrown in for good measure,” said Jimmy John, winking at Jane. Jane winked rakishly back. After all, grandmother was a thousand miles away.

“Bang goes saxpence,” said dad. He did not try to “jew” Jimmy John down. That he could buy all this loveliness for four hundred dollars was enough luck.

Dad handed over fifty dollars and said the rest would be paid next day.

“The house is yours,” said Jimmy John with an air of making them a present of it. But Jane knew the house had always been theirs.

“The house … and the pond … and the harbour … and the gulf! A good buy,” said dad. “And half an acre of land. All my life I’ve wanted to own a bit of land … just enough to stand on and say, ‘This is mine.’ And now, Jane, it’s brillig.”

“Four o’clock in the afternoon.” Jane knew her Alice too well to be caught tripping on that.

Just as they were leaving, a pocket edition of Jimmy John, with a little impudent face came tearing through the maple grove with the key which had turned up in his absence. Jimmy John handed it to Jane with a bow. Jane clutched it tightly all the way back to Brookview. She loved it. Think what it would open for her!

They discovered they were hungry, having forgotten all about dinner, so they fished out Mrs Meade’s butter cookies and ate them.

“You’ll let me do the cooking, dad?”

“Why, you’ll have to.
I
can’t.”

Jane glowed.

“I wish we could move in to-morrow, dad.”

“Why not? I can get some bedding and some food. We can go on from there.”

“I just can’t bear to have this day go,” said Jane. “It doesn’t seem as if there could ever be another so happy.”

“We’ve got to-morrow, Jane … let me see … we’ve got about ninety-five to-morrows.”

“Ninety-five,” gloated Jane.

“And we’ll do just as we want to inside of decency. We’ll be clean but not too clean. We’ll be lazy but not too lazy … just do enough to keep three jumps ahead of the wolf. And we’ll never have in our house that devilish thing known as an intermittent alarm clock.”

“But we must have some kind of a clock,” said Jane.

“Timothy Salt down at the harbour mouth has an old ship’s clock. I’ll get him to lend it to us. It only goes when it feels like it, but what matter? Can you darn my socks, Jane?”

“Yes,” said Jane, who had never darned a sock in her life.

“Jane, we’re sitting on the top of the world. It was a piece of amazing luck, your asking that man, Jane.”

“It wasn’t luck. I KNEW he’d know,” said Jane. “And oh, dad, can we keep the house a secret till we’ve moved in?”

“Of course,” agreed dad. “From every one except Aunt Irene. We’ll have to tell her, of course.”

Jane said nothing. She had not known till dad spoke that it was really from Aunt Irene she wished to keep it secret.

Jane didn’t believe she would sleep that night. How could one go to sleep with so many wonderful things to think of? And some that were very puzzling. How could two people like mother and dad hate each other? It didn’t make sense. They were both so lovely in different ways. They must have loved each other once. What had changed them? If she, Jane, only knew the whole truth, perhaps she could do something about it.

But as she drifted off into dreams of spruce-shadowed red roads that all led to dear little houses, her last conscious thought was “I wonder if we can get our milk at the Jimmy Johns’.”

They “moved in” the next afternoon. Dad and Jane went to town in the forenoon and got a load of canned stuff and some bedding. Jane also got some gingham dresses and aprons. She knew none of the clothes grandmother had bought for her would be of any use at Lantern Hill. And she slipped into a bookstore unbeknown to dad and bought a Cookery for Beginners. Mother had given her a dollar when she left and she was not going to take any chances.

They called to see Aunt Irene but Aunt Irene was out, and Jane had her own reasons for being pleased about this but she kept them to herself. After dinner they tied Jane’s trunk and suitcase on the running-boards and bounced off to Lantern Hill. Mrs Meade gave them a box of doughnuts, three leaves of bread, a round pat of butter with a pattern of clover-leaves on it, a jar of cream, a raisin pie and three dried codfish.

“Put one in soak to-night and broil it for your breakfast in the morning,” she told Jane.

The house was still there. Jane had been half afraid it would be stolen in the night. It seemed so entirely desirable to her that she couldn’t imagine any one else not wanting it. She felt so sorry for Aunt Matilda Jollie who had had to die and leave it. It was hard to believe that, even in the golden mansions, Aunt Matilda Jollie wouldn’t miss the house on Lantern Hill.