“Yes, ma’am,” said Arthur, with affected timidity, “but I’m very expensive, you know.”
“What is that to me,” scornfully Marcella replied. “I could raise a thousand as easily as a—hundred.”
“Yes,” laughed her brother. “Marcella said this morning that she had just five cents left of her allowance.”
“Now, Larry! You know it is not polite to tell family secrets, especially about money.”
“Well, who mentioned money first, I ask the assembled company?”
Betty, laughing, caught Larry’s eye, and he stretched a hand to lift her from her seat by Arthur. “Come, Titania; you have wasted enough time in encouragement of art, with or without a capital letter. Let’s turn on the victrola. No radio tonight, I reckon. It was sputtering to beat the band at our shack awhile ago.”
“A lot of interference from ships and shore,” said Ted Dorrance, “beside the weather—naught but static this eve.”
Hot fudge was good and the evening was merry, yet all of the young company were more or less conscious of the sea and its restless menace.
Yet when morning came, it was as Chet had said, bright and sunny, with a blue sky. The waves were still high and the stretch of water to the skyline a glorious sight. Betty selected a high rock, back of the beach proper, some distance from the Gwynne cottage, where she could sit and watch the incoming rollers with their white crests. The girls had gone down early in the hope of finding new shells brought in by the storm. Betty had a little market bag full of pretty ones. “I have to watch this a long time, Kathryn,” said she soberly to her friend, who had followed her. “Do you suppose it could fade out of a body’s mind, just like a film that you had taken full of pictures and then didn’t have developed?”
“Well, you are original, Betty! Who else would think of that? I’d like to remember it, too. I feel as if something is going to happen, Betty. Why, do suppose?”