CHAPTER IV

IN THE SAND

The northeaster lasted three days. Then it blew itself out, the wind
shifted to the northwest, and there was beautiful sparkling weather for
the rest of the week.

During this time, the two new friends came to know each other very well
indeed. It was not only their little shared mystery that united
them--they found they had congenial tastes and interests in very many
directions, although they were so different in temperament. Leslie was
slight and dark in appearance, rather timid in disposition, and inclined
to be shy and hesitant in manner. Phyllis was quite the opposite--large
and plump and rosy, courageous and independent, jolly, and often headlong
and thoughtless in action. Her mother had died when she was very little,
and she had grown up mainly in the care of nurses and servants, from whom
she had imbibed some very queer notions, as Leslie was not long in
discovering. One of these was her firm belief in ghosts and haunted
houses, which not even the robust and wholesome contempt of her father
and older brother Ted had succeeded in changing.

But Phyllis had a special gift which drew the two girls together with a
strong attraction: she was a devoted lover of music and so accomplished a
pianist as to be almost a genius--for one of her age. The whole family
seemed to be musical. Her father played the 'cello and Ted the violin,
but Phyllis's work at the piano far surpassed theirs. And Leslie, too,
loved music devotedly, though she neither sang nor played any instrument.
It was a revelation to her when, on the next rainy afternoon, she
accompanied Phyllis to the living-room of Fisherman's Luck and listened
to a recital such as she had never expected to hear outside of a
concert-hall.

"Oh, Phyllis, it's wonderful--simply wonderful!" she sighed blissfully
when the last liquid ripples of a Chopin waltz had died away. "I don't
see how you ever learned to play like that! But what in the world are you
going to do now?" For Phyllis had jumped up with an impatient
exclamation, laid back the cover of the grand piano, and was hunting
frantically in the music cabinet for something.

"Why, I'm going to tune the old thing!" she declared. "This salt air is
enough to wreck any piano, and this one is so old that it's below pitch
most of the time. But of course it wouldn't do to have a very good one
here. That's why Dad sent this one down. I just _had_ to lear