“But where will you go? what will you do?” demanded that young lady, severely. “You say the captain of the schooner and his wife are nothing to you?”
“I should say not!” exclaimed Nita. “They were nice and kind to me, though.”
“And you can’t go away until you have something decent to wear,” added Heavy’s aunt. “That’s the first thing to ’tend to.”
And although it was a bright and beautiful morning after the gale, and there were a dozen things the girls were all eager to see, they spent the forenoon in trying to make up an outfit for Nita so that she would be presentable. The boys went off with Mr. Stone’s boatkeeper in the motor launch and Mary Cox was quite cross because the other girls would not leave Miss Kate to fix up Nita the best she could, so that they could all accompany the boys. But in the afternoon the buckboard was brought around and they drove to the lighthouse.
Nita, even in her nondescript garments, was really a pretty girl. No awkwardness of apparel could hide the fact that she had nice features and that her body was strong and lithe. She moved about with a freedom that the other girls did not possess. Even Ruth was not so athletic as the strange girl. And yet she seemed to know nothing at all about the games and the exercises which were commonplace to the girls from Briarwood Hall.
There was a patch of wind-blown, stunted trees and bushes covering several acres of the narrowing point, before the driving road along the ridge brought the visitors to Sokennet Light. While they were driving through this a man suddenly bobbed up beside the way and the driver hailed him.
“Hullo, you Crab!” he said. “Found anything ’long shore from that wreck?”
The man stood up straight and the girls thought him a very horrid-looking object. He had a great beard and his hair was dark and long.
“He’s a bad one for looks; ain’t he, Miss?” asked the driver of Ruth, who sat beside him.
“He isn’t very attractive,” she returned.