“Another foreigner!” thought Anne Poole. “That makes three of them already. What an odd group for me!” And her little nose rose higher in the air.
Norma was not a foreigner. Her people had not lived in America so long as had the people of Nancy or Beverly or Nelly Sackett. But Norma was just as truly an American as they; since her Italian-born father was now a naturalized citizen, a merchant in New York where she herself had been born.
“I am Beverly Peyton, of Virginia,” drawled the pretty Southerner, waiting for no introduction and holding out her hand cordially. Beverly had not forgotten how cold the first greeting of these Northern girls had seemed to her warm Southern heart, when a week earlier she had arrived, a stranger to all but the Batchelders. She knew that they were not really cold; it was just the Yankee offhand way. But she wanted to cheer up this pale, big-eyed newcomer.
Anne, however, did not seem to appreciate Beverly’s advance. She dropped the warm little hand as soon as convenient, and stood staring at the last of the six girls—the freckled, sandy one.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re Captain Sackett’s niece. I used to call him Uncle Eph’ once. Are you a member of this Club, too?” There was something in the way she said it that made Nelly Sackett flush and draw back the hand she had half extended, following Beverly’s lead.
“Of course she is a member of the Round Robin,” said Nancy, clapping Nelly on the shoulder in a boyish fashion. “We couldn’t do without Nelly, though she doesn’t live at Camp. She lives at Cap’n Sackett’s, a mile and a half away.”
“The idea of a fisherman’s daughter in my Club!” thought Anne Poole. “Well!” Just then a whoop rent the air and the cry—“Hurry up, girls!”
“The boys are getting impatient,” Nancy explained to Anne. “They’re always in a hurry. Your trunks are in the motor-boat already; three of them! I guess the boys didn’t bargain for more than one. We shall be pretty crowded. But we shan’t mind, if you don’t.”
Anne had seen two roughly-dressed young men struggling with her boxes, while a red-haired boy walked away with her suit-case. She had supposed them to be porters. What was her amazement to learn they were to be her neighbors and camp companions in this strange summer. For the bronze young man wearing the service star was Hugh Batchelder, it seemed. And his taller friend with the silver star of a wounded veteran was Victor Lanfranc, late of the French Flying Corps. While the funny Dick Reed, whom they called “Reddy,” and who shook Anne’s arm up and down like a pump handle, when he was introduced, much to her disgust, was being tutored by Hugh Batchelder at his mother’s camp.
Presently the Togo full of girls and boys and trunks and puppy, all comfortably mingled, was chugging away over the blue waters of the Harbor into a wild, beautiful section of the “country of the pointed firs.” The air was pungent with the smell of balsam and bay and sweet fern, mingled with a salty fragrance that is the breath of life to true Yankees, and which even Beverly Peyton’s aristocratic little Southern nose was beginning to love. Perched awkwardly on one of her own trunks, Anne Poole scanned the rocky shore eagerly, as they approached a high point.