“Lunch, I hope,” said Alice laughingly, “and I’ll beat you to the bath house to dress for it.”
Later when they had had their good luncheon and were sitting on the veranda of the Casino where they could watch the airship take on a passenger and sail away toward the north for a long flight, Mary Jane remembered about the shells.
“Of course we want to get some,” said Alice; “let’s go now.”
“You girls start while I see about the bath locker,” suggested Mrs. Merrill. “Maybe we can arrange to leave our things here till we come again; then we could carry more shells.”
When she got down to the beach a little later she found that the girls had already collected a great pile of shells from the many there were to be found on the beach.
“You wouldn’t want to take any but perfect ones home, I’m sure,” said Mrs. Merrill; “suppose we spread every shell out where it can be seen. Then we’ll throw all the ones that are not perfect back into the ocean. The others we’ll take home.”
Alice and Mary Jane set to work examining the shells and they found that in their eagerness for collecting they had picked up a good many that were not worth carrying home. So it was quite a respectable sized pile they finally decided they wanted to take.
“There,” said Mary Jane with a sigh of content, when the sorting was finished, “there they are and if it wasn’t ten miles home, I’d be glad we had them.”
“You’ll be glad anyway, dear,” said Mrs. Merrill, “because we’re going to ride home. I ordered a taxi when I was up at the bath house. Here it comes now.”
And sure enough! There it was coming right down by the water to meet them. Mary Jane was sure the wheels would get stuck in the sand; but they didn’t; they didn’t even sink in. They just acted as though that beach was a regular road—which it wasn’t.