“Mademoiselle!” called the woman in the cap sharply. She came up puffing with her hurry. “Mademoiselle has escape again—Mademoiselle is ba-ad!” she scolded.
“I didn’t ex-scape, either—I only walked. You don’t walk when you ex-scape. You sat and sat and sat, and I wanted to walk.”
The child’s voice was full of grievance. Sometimes she dreaded Elise—when she saw her coming down the beach—but she was never afraid of her “near to.”
“But it is not for Mademoiselle to walk so far—what is it the doctor say? Mademoiselle is ba-ad when she walk so far!”
With a sudden gesture of defiance the Dainty One sprang away across the sand, looking over her shoulder willfully. “But it’s so good to walk!” she cried. “You’d walk if you was me, Elise—you’d walk and walk and walk! Like this—see me! See me run—like this!”
The eyes of the woman in the white nurse’s cap met for an instant the eyes of the boy-girl in the oilskins, and Judith smiled. But Elise was gravely tender—Elise’s face could undergo swift changes, too.
“Yes, certainment I would,” muttered Elise, looking away to the naughty little figure. It was running back now.
“And then you’d be goody again—see me!” chanted the child. “And you’d go right straight back to Elise—that would be me, if you were I—and you’d put your arms round her, so, and say, ‘’Scuse me,’—hear me!”
Judith Lynn got into the old brown dory and rowed away to her lobster-traps. There was no laughter any more in her eyes; they were fierce with longing and envy. Not for herself—Judith was sixteen, but she had never been fierce or envious for herself. It had always been—it would always be—for Blossom, the frail little wisp of a girl she loved.
She was thinking intensely, What if that were Blossom, running down the beach? They were about of a “tallness”—why shouldn’t it be Blossom? Why shouldn’t Blossom run down the beach like that and call “See me!”