Probably Mrs. Fulbert never found out her mistake; for Lord Somerville reported that he had never been so pitched into in his life as by an old girl in a 'stunning tile,' who found him washing out an empty pie-dish for the benefit of some maritime monsters that he wanted to carry home to his sisters; but that when Lance came up, she was as meek as a mouse. Certainly, the two boys were little sturdy fellows, burnt lobster-like up to the roots of their bleached and rough hair; and their costumes were more adapted to the deck of the Kittiwake in all weathers, than to genteel society. Their sisters were in an aquarium fever, and their sport all through their expedition had been researches for what they had learnt in Scotland to call 'beasts;' and now the collection was to be completed from the mouth of the Ewe, and the scrambling and tumbling it involved were enchanting.
Kate Staples, who usually considered Lance her charge, was not sorry to see a croquet player disposed of among his own congeners; for the game seemed such a necessary of life, that it was actually prepared for on the sands, to the extreme contempt of the anemone hunters. 'Play at croquet, forsooth, when rocks aren't to be had to scramble on every day!' And scramble ecstatically they did, up and over slippery stone and rock festooned with olive weed, peeping into pools of crystal clearness, and admiring rosy fans of weed, and jewel-like actinias embellished by the magic beauty of intense clear brightness. The boys took off shoes and stockings, turned up trousers, and scrambled and paddled like creatures to the manner born.
'O dear! I wish I might!' sighed the young lady.
'Why don't you?' said Charlie Audley. 'Kate and Em and Annie always do—don't they, Frank?'
'Of course they do, or how would they ever get on!'
'Come along then, Miss Gertrude,' said Charlie. 'You can't think how jolly it is!'
And soon another pair of little white feet were dancing on the rocks. 'Oh dear! what a blunder of civilisation it is to wear shoes at all! How delicious a hold one gets!'
'I can't think why people do wear them! They never are anything but a bother,' said Lance.
'To play at foot-ball with,' suggested Somerville from the top of a rock.
'But women don't,' said Gertrude.