“What do you know, Adrian?”
“Know? Why, I haven’t been about with Kit and Ted Harewood for nothing! Jolly good larks it is to see how all of you take for granted that a fellow never knew the taste of anything but tea and milk-and-water.”
“But what do you know the taste of?” she asked, with an earnestness that provoked the boy to tease and put on a boasting manner, so that she could not tell how much he was pretending for the sake of amazing and tormenting her, in which he certainly succeeded.
However, his attention was diverted by coming round the corner to where there was a view of Anscombe Bay, when he immediately began to fight his battles o’er again, and show where they had been groping in the mud and seaweed in pursuit of sea-urchins, and stranded star-fish, and crabs.
“And it wasn’t a forest after all, it was just a sell—nothing but mud and weed, only Fergus would go and poke in it, and there were horrid great rough stones and rocks too, and I tumbled over one.”
Anna here became conscious that the whole place was the resort of the afternoon promenaders of Rockquay, great and small, of all ranks and degrees, belonging to the “middle class” or below it, and that they might themselves become the object of attention; and she begged her brother to turn back and wait till they could have the place to themselves.
“These are a disgusting lot of cads,” he agreed, “but there won’t be such a jolly tide another time. I declare I see the very rock where I saw the sea-mouse—out there! red and shiny at the top.”
Here a well-dressed man, who had just come up the Coast-guard path, put aside his pipe, and taking off his hat, deferentially asked—
“Have I the honour of addressing Sir Adrian Vanderkist?”
Adrian replied with a gracious nod and gesture towards his straw hat, and in another moment Anna found him answering questions, and giving his own account of the adventure to the inquirer, who, she had little doubt, was a reporter, and carrying his head, if possible, higher in consequence as he told how Fergus Merrifield had lingered over his stones, and all the rest after his own version. She did not hear the whole, having had to answer the inquiries of one of the bicycle friends of the previous day, but when her attention was free she heard—