"Well, first I go after those children. And then I buy the Cinder Pond and build a lovely big home-y house like this on the green hillside back of it--across the road, you know, from where we go down to the dock. And of course I always buy the dock and the pond for sort of an extra front yard. Then, I have a comfortable big automobile with a very good-natured chauffeur to take the children to and from school and a rented mother--" "A _what_?" "A nice, mother-y person to keep house and tell the cook--a very good one like Bridget--what to give us for meals. I always have a nice supper ready for Old Captain, ready on his table to surprise him when he comes home at night. That is, in summer. In winter, he lives with us. Of course I'm having the children educated so they can earn their own living when they grow up, because I might want to be married some day--I've decided to wait, though, until I'm about twenty-seven, because it's so much fun to be just a girl. I'll have Sammy learn to be a discoverer, I think, because he's so inquisitive; and maybe Annie can sing in a choir--she has a _sweet_ little voice. And Patsy loves grasshoppers--I don't know just what he _can_ do." "Perhaps he'll make a good naturalist, a professor of zoölogy," laughed Mrs. Fairchild, "but you've left _me_ out." "Oh, no, I haven't. You're my fairy godmother and my very best friend. You always help me buy clothes for the children and pick out wallpapers and rugs and things. You always have _lovely_ times in my house." "I'd certainly have the time of my life," agreed Mrs. Fairchild, "if your dream-house were real." "Well," sighed Jeanne, "it isn't--in the daytime. I've only two dollars left in my pincushion. I guess that wouldn't raise a very large family. And there isn't any way for a chest of gold to be washed up on the Cinder Pond beach, because no ship could get inside the pond, unless it climbed right over the dock. And of course, without that chest, the rest of the dream wouldn't work. I've tried to move the chest to the _other_ beach; but some way, it doesn't fit that one--other people might see it there and find it first." "Yes," agreed Mrs. Fairchild, "the chest is certainly the most necessary part of that dream; but I fear Old Captain is the only golden treasure the Cinder Pond has for us: I like him better every time I see him." CHAPTER XXVI A PADLOCKED DOOR Mr. Huntington's lawyers assured Mr. Fairchild, who had written to find out more definitely about the settling of Mr. Huntington's estate, that there was practically no doubt that Jeannette Huntington Duval, being her mother's sole heir, would inherit half of her grandfather's large fortune, safely invested in a long list of things, as soon as certain formalities had been observed. Further search had revealed no trace of the lost document. Undoubtedly Mr. Huntington had destroyed it.