“I’ll bet I could do it with a lasso, Nancy,” grinned the boy good-naturedly, “though the critters do have nex’ to no necks.” Dick Reed was always making atrocious puns like this one, which the girls pretended not to notice. “I figured I’d get a nice mess for all our suppers. But”—he glanced ruefully at the two small red objects sidling about the bottom of the dory, “I reckon I’ll have to make it a private donation to the newest comer; a sort of peace-offering. Say, do you suppose she will like ’em?”
“Why shouldn’t she like them?” asked Cicely Vane, the English girl, in her clear soft tones.
“Yes? Why shouldn’t she like them?” Nancy Batchelder repeated her cousin’s question in her more animated and penetrating voice. “I suppose she eats like the rest of us.”
“Well, we’ll soon see,” said Dick, landing another crab dexterously. “There you are, old Sidestepper! And proud you ought to be to make a lunch for the Golden Girl.”
“Hush, Dick!” cautioned Nancy, “Don’t let any stranger hear you call her that. It sounds so—so vulgar. You’ll forget sometime, and she will hear you.”
“She’s got good ears if she can hear me now,” muttered Dick.
“We used to call her that last summer,” Nancy whispered to her chum. “You know, she has lived here longer than any of us, really. But I don’t believe she knows the nice, dear corners of Old Harbor, or the nice, dear comfortable people as well as we do. She never went anywhere off her father’s place, they say, except to ride or drive or sail in his yacht. Though when she was a tiny little girl she used to run down to Cap’n Sackett’s often. That was before Nelly went there to live.”
“Didn’t she come to see you at the camp?” queried Cicely, wondering at the inconsistent ways of these Americans, in a land where everyone was supposed to be “equal.” “I should have thought she would be lonesome in that big house.”
“Dear me, no!” laughed Nancy. “She never even looked at us in those days. You ought to have seen her nose go up in the air when she passed us in the motor. She had girls and boys on house parties to visit her sometimes. But they came from far away, and flocked by themselves. Mrs. Poole, her stepmother, is a dressy, snobby kind of woman. I’m glad my mother isn’t like that! The people here scarcely know her by sight. Nobody likes Mr. Poole, either. He is what they call a ‘hard man,’ whatever that may mean.”
“In England it has something to do with money and not being kind,” said Cicely vaguely. “I don’t think I shall like this rich girl of yours, Nancy.”