“I ought to offer to help Mother unpack,” said Mavis, and went walking slowly.
She came back after a little while, however, quickly running.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Mother’s going to meet Daddy at the Junction this afternoon and buy us sunbonnets. And we’re to take our spades and go down to the sea till dinnertime—it’s roast rabbit and apple dumps—I asked Mrs. Pearce—and we can go to the circus by ourselves—and she never said a word about promise not to touch the animals.”
So off they went, down the white road where the yellowhammer was talking about himself as usual on the tree just beyond wherever you happened to be walking. And so to the beach.
Now, it is very difficult to care much about a Mermaid you have never seen or heard or touched. On the other hand, when once you have seen one and touched one and heard one speak, you seem to care for very little else. This was why when they got to the shore Kathleen and Bernard began at once to dig the moat of a sandcastle, while the elder ones walked up and down, dragging the new spades after them like some new kind of tail, and talking, talking, talking till Kathleen said they might help dig or the tide would be in before the castle was done.
“You don’t know what a lark sandcastles are, France,” she added kindly, “because you’ve never seen the sea before.”
So then they all dug and piled and patted and made molds of their pails to stand as towers to the castle and dug out dungeons and tunnels and bridges, only the roof always gave way in the end unless you had beaten the sand very tight beforehand. It was a glorious castle, though not quite finished when the first thin flat wash of the sea reached it. And then everyone worked twice as hard trying to keep the sea out till all was hopeless, and then everyone crowded into the castle and the sea washed it away bit by bit till there was only a shapeless island left, and everyone was wet through and had to change every single thing the minute they got home. You will know by that how much they enjoyed themselves.
After the roast rabbit and the apple dumplings Mother started on the sunbonnet-and-meet-Daddy expedition. Francis went with her to the station and returned a little sad.
“I had to promise not to touch any of the animals,” he said. “And perhaps a Mermaid is an animal.”