Grace had given her a note to deliver to her landlady, but Mrs. Blaine had no need of any urging from her former young mistress to be extra kind and thoughtful to Miss Pennington, for she had lost her heart to Polly on the spot. As she said to Grace on a later occasion:
“She’ve got eyes, miss, that fairly witch one; and when she smiles, why, she’s just lovely!”
Polly spent that first evening of solitary holiday in wandering over the beach and sea-washed rocks.
The tide went out very far at Beachcroft, and it took Polly quite half an hour to walk to its rippling, white-frothed edge, and when she had arrived there, she did, of course, just what one would expect Polly to do; she sat down on the wet sands, took off her little shoes and stockings, and slinging them about her neck, she waded through the murmuring wavelets, feeling like a creature set free after a long term of imprisonment.
It was a glorious sensation, and no amount of discomfort robbed that evening of its full measure of joy.
What if she did drop one of her shoes in the water? She could walk barefoot back over the rocks, a feat that delayed her so long in reaching the parade—magnificent name for about a dozen yards of asphalt in front of the few houses Beachcroft could claim—that she found Mrs. Blaine waiting for her at the door with some anxiety.
A large tub of water to cleanse away the sand from the little pink feet, a delicious supper of lobster, homemade bread, hot cakes and honey—Polly had a really excellent digestion—sleep in the large, fresh lavender-scented bed, and then dreams to put an end to a day which had begun with a broken spirit and real misery, and finished more sweetly than any day Polly had known in the last year.
“I am getting splendidly cured,” she murmured to herself, in her last moment of conscious thought. “By to-morrow I shall have forgotten that I ever had a heartache or that there ever existed a man called Valentine, or a woman named Christina.”
A delightful statement to go to sleep upon, but alas! the next morning the ache stole back again, and the weary question started anew.
“It is because it is a wet day,” Polly said to herself, valiantly. “I am always in the dumps on a wet day.”