"Please excuse me for being so hysterical," she begged. "But it's been such a queer day! And I've just had such a dreadful fright I hardly know who's crazy and who isn't!"
"A fright?" deprecated Jaffrey Bretton with increasing formality.
"Yes! Coming ashore just now," cried the Intruding Lady, "I thought I saw a man walking on the water! Way out in the Gulf it was! Almost a mile I should think! But when I looked again it was a fish!" very faintly, but none the less palpably her teeth began to chatter. "But when I looked again it was a man! It was!"
"Nothing at all to be alarmed about," interposed Jaffrey Bretton 126 quickly; "it was just our butler doing his calisthenics."
"Your—butler?" stammered the Intruding Lady.
"Yes—you have probably noticed that the water is exceedingly thin in spots" then with a precipitate return of his manners Jaffrey Bretton waved her toward the green-shadowed sand nest which he had just vacated.
"Have a shade, madam!" he begged her. "You seem quite out of breath! And as though you had been running!"
"Running?" rallied the lady. "I have been galloping!" Rather cautiously, but none the less gratefully, she edged her way into the wavy green shadow. "And even after I got ashore," she confided, "I met such queer things on the beach! Oh, pelicans, I mean," she added hastily, "and fiddler crabs! Crowds and crowds of——"
"We shall have to have a traffic cop," mused Jaffrey Bretton. But even as he mused he stood with one hand shading his eyes while he raked the vacant horizon line for some thing that seemed to perplex him.
"When you spoke of coming ashore just now," he turned and asked 127 the lady quite abruptly, "just what, may I ask, were you on?"