"You shall have a beautiful boat all your own some day, my Wing, and we 'll sail away in it together."
She comforted him, drying his tears on her blue veil.
"Oh, jeer buck!" sniffled Bran, trying to cheer up, "and will daddy come too?"
Val thought of a lost ship in which she had thought to sail with all she loved to the islands of the blest, and her breath caught in her throat. "Yes, darling, let us pray so," she said, though she had no hope.
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From that day forward the Shai-pooites and the Duvalites were constantly together. The two parties joined forces and were as one man in all things that pertained to amusements and making the sunny days fly by.
There was always the daily excursion to the beach. Kitty and Haidee were as much at home in the water as two seals, and Val too was a good swimmer. Harriott always turned blue when she had been in two or three minutes, so her lot in life was to stay on the beach and rub Bran down when he came from floundering like a little scarlet tadpole in the surf. The Insanes wore red twill costumes, and resembled nothing so much as a band of Indians on the warpath when they came prancing from the cabins across the flat beach, with the Shai-pooites in dark blue maillots at their heels. A strange note of colour was a scarf of deep orange, which Val wore round her head, dock fashion. She never let her cropped head be seen by any one, though it was well covered now with little sprouting fluffy curls. Only Bran was allowed to see it in the nights, and loved to nestle against it, as a bird nestles against the downy breast of its mother. From the rest of the world she kept her distance, even in the sea, for she hated any one to see the curiousness of her face without its frame of hair.
The Comtesse was learning to "make the plank"--otherwise float, and on calm days incessant laughter came streaming over the smooth, silky waves, as her plump little person was held up by a ring of instructors. When all seemed well they let go, and immediately a shrill cry would ring out:
"Ah, mon Dieu! Je coule.... Je coule dans le milieu. I am sinking in ze middle!" And down she would drop and come up spluttering: "Ah! Quelle abomination de la désolation!"
But she never went in deep enough to damage the wild-rose flush in her cheeks and the blue mountain shadows round her eyes. The two English girls and Celine Lorrain came out always sleek as seals, their hair dripping and dank about them, but when Madame de Vervanne's cerise head-wrap was unbound, never a hair was out of place. She thoroughly understood the art of bathing beautifully. Later, arrayed in a wondrous kimono, she would take a sun bath on the beach, scuffling her bare feet daintily in the sand.