"There 's something red fastened to the mast," he shrieked excitedly, and upstairs two necks were craned to cracking point from Kitty's bedroom window. Insufficiently clothed as he was Bran tore out to the boat, and came back bearing in triumph an enormous cabbage rose--full blown, and rather tired from being up all night. Both girls put out their hands for it. Bran looked at them in surprise.
"Why, it was in my boat! Perhaps an angel put it there for me..." The girls turned away in wrath. Later they were each seen to go separately to the Jules and give a sort of casual glance into the bottom of it. It was possible, of course, that Bran might have overlooked something!
"Only one rose! How clever of those young scamps!" chuckled Val, and Harriott with joyful malice pinned the flopping rose to the breast of Bran's red sweater, where it drooped its life away.
The girls were constrained with each other all day. The tide was low and there was no excuse to go to the beach. Perhaps that was why the two took books and sat in the Jules all the morning pretending to read, but with a keen lookout on the road and all stray cyclists. Bran, greatly delighted to have passengers, took them several voyages to New York and back. Harry and Val, professing to be busy inside the Villa, cast many an intrigued glance from the windows. Nothing happened.
Next morning a basket of figs was found in the boat--beautiful, luscious, purple figs. Now the only fig-trees in Mascaret grew in the garden of the Admiral of Shai-poo!
Val and Harriott went to early Mass, and returning ran into the two heroes coming up from the river. They had been for an early morning sail, and wore a pleasantly disreputable air in their blue fisherman jerseys and turned-up coat collars. They cast sheepish glances at the two ladies, and the younger had the grace to blush.
"They really are nice-looking boys," Harriott admitted, but at the breakfast table a few minutes later she expressed herself differently.
"We met those two Romeos from the Villa Shai-poo as we were coming from Mass," she announced. "Seedy-looking fellows. One of them looked as if a tub might do him good."
The girls bristled like Irish terriers.
"Which one?" they demanded in one breath.