roofed over, and its sides
pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to
bind the wanderer to the soil. It had been painted by the sun and the
wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it
was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering
sky, and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling
its character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it
the Golden House. Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.

With Edith went one of her Baltimore cousins, a young kindergarten
teacher of fine intelligence and sympathetic manner, who brought to
her work a long tradition of gentle breeding and gayety and
simplicity--qualities which all children are sure to recognize. What a
hopeful thing it is, by-the-way, in the world, that all conditions of
people know a lady at sight! Jack found the place delightful. He liked
its quaintness, the primitiveness of the farmer-fisherman neighbors, he
liked the sea. And then he could run up to the city any morning and back
at night. He spent the summer with Edith at the Golden House. This was
his theory. When he went to town in the morning he expected to return at
night. But often he telegraphed in the afternoon that he was detained by
business; he had to see Henderson, or Mavick was over from Washington.
Occasionally, but not often, he missed the train. He had too keen a
sense of the ridiculous to miss the train often. When he was detained
over for two or three days, or the better part of the week, he wrote
Edith dashing, hurried letters, speaking of ever so many places he had
been to and ever so many people he had seen--yes, Carmen and Miss Tavish
and everybody who was in town, and he did not say too much about the hot
city and its discomforts.

Henderson's affairs kept him in town, Miss Tavish still postponed Bar
Harbor, and Carmen willingly remained. She knew the comfort of a big New
York house when the season is over, when no social duties are required,
and one is at leisure to lounge about in cool costumes, to read or
dream, to open the windows at night for the salt breeze from the bay, to
take little excursions by boat or rail, to dine al fresco in the garden
of some semi-foreign hotel, to taste the unconventional pleasures of the
town, as if one were in some foreign city. She used to say that New York
in matting and hollands was almost as nice as Buda-Pesth. These were
really summer