Just above the millrace was a quiet pool under the bank where great, fragrant water-lilies floated upon the surface. Those lilies always attracted Nancy. She wished she were a boy. Boys could do so many things forbidden to girls!
She longed to strip off her shoes and stockings and wade into the black water to obtain some of the lilies. She had no idea that, just beyond the little patch of marine plants, the bottom of the pond fell away abruptly, and that a current tugged stoutly for the millrace.
On this particular day, when she had left Miss Trigg reading in her favorite summer-house high on the rocky hill, and Nancy had tripped lightly down to the path that skirted the pond’s steep edge, there was a boy doing just what she had so wished to do herself.
He was a good-natured looking boy, with plump cheeks and a mass of light, curly hair that he probably hated, but Nancy thought it made him look “too cute for anything.”
He might have been three years her senior, and was a strong, healthy-looking youth.
Nancy stopped in the fringe of bushes and watched him. She saw him pluck several of the long-stemmed beauties, and she wondered, if she showed herself when he came ashore, he would offer her some.
Then she became aware of several voices in the neighborhood—girls’ voices. They seemed to be calling to the boy, for once he lifted his shining face and shouted something.
Nancy looked keenly in the direction his eyes took. Through the trees she saw that an automobile stood on the bridge—or right at its beginning. The boy belonged to the automobile party. They had spied the lilies, and he had come down to wade into the pond for them.
Of course he was getting them for the other girls—he would give none to Nancy.
She could see the chauffeur, in his duster and goggles, standing in the road, too. But the girls who chatted so gaily, and shouted to the boy in the water, she could not see at all, try her best.