Dora stopped in the pantry doorway, her eyes big and blue. “Do you think we can be going to the beach?” she asked eagerly.
“My, I hope so!” said Lucy. “We haven’t been away this summer. And Father said last night that the press was going to shut down for the week after Labor Day.”
Dora looked out of the window across the street at the low brick building where Father Merrill worked in the printing office.
“We had better not ask too many questions,” she said wisely. “Perhaps Uncle Dan is going to take us to White Beach for a day. But we did go to the vacation school, Lucy, and that was a great deal of fun.”
“It was,” agreed Lucy. “And it cost a dollar a week. But just one day at the beach would be lovely. I wish the Sunday-school picnic had gone there.”
Dora didn’t agree with Lucy. That annual picnic had been held at World’s End Pond. Even the salt water could not be nicer than that place.
Just as Lucy finished the last peach, Mrs. Merrill came in. Dora brought the sugar-bowl from the pantry and looked hard at her mother. Sometimes it was possible to tell by Mother’s face how she felt about things.
Mrs. Merrill did not seem disturbed, but neither did she look as though she was thinking of anything especially pleasant. She put the rest of the supper on the table and told Lucy to call her father and Uncle Dan.
It was Uncle Dan who told the secret. Right in the middle of supper he turned to his sister.
“You know, Molly,” he began, “Jack says I may have his tent and we should need only one.”