Mrs. Ess Kay had a headache next morning, and stopped in bed. She couldn't speak or be spoken to, and so we couldn't possibly ask her advice about going to Bailey's Beach for a dip in the sea. Potter--whose proposal it was--said that this was perhaps Providential, as she was almost certain to want me to stay in till I could be taken out officially. "But you don't need to know that," he added.
I looked at Sally, and she laughed; so I knew that I was to go.
"Oh, but what about bathing clothes!" I exclaimed, on a sudden thought. "How stupid of me not to have remembered that I would want them, before I left home, or in New York!"
"I reckon it would have been stupid of us if we hadn't remembered," said Sally. Then she went on,--irrelevantly, it seemed at first: "What day of the month is to-morrow?"
"The twenty-ninth of July," said Potter, promptly, while I was resigning myself, after a slight struggle, to the fact that I had lost track of dates.
"Seem's to me that's somebody's birthday, isn't it?" Sally appeared to address her remark to the ceiling.
"How did you know?" I exclaimed.
"A little bird told me; the kind that builds in birthday books. It lives on a table in Lady Victoria's 'den'."
"Fancy your keeping the date in your head all this time!"
"I've a weakness for remembering birthdays--when I'm fond of the people who own them. You see, everybody thinks about Christmas, and I don't want to be confused with everybody, in the minds of just those special people. Now, the truth is, I've got a little birthday present upstairs, which I didn't mean you should see until tomorrow, but as part of it may come in rather handy this morning, perhaps we might run up and have a look at it."