“Yes! if it wasn’t day in and day out, for months at a stretch,” murmured the older girl, arching delicate, dark eyebrows somewhat ruefully over her stocking. “Well, our beets and carrots--all the other vegetable things, too--are coming along. We’ll have quite a cargo soon for Captain Andy to take over in his boat to some of the summer colonies and dispose of. Think of giving a big bunch of profits to the Red Cross!”
“And of having all the little infant carrots that are thinned out--to give others a chance to grow--for our own eating, meantime!” Sara laughed. “Terra-cotta babies, so tender an’ pink! Makes one feel like an ogre to devour them before they ever get a chance to mature.”
“Survival of the fittest, Sally!” Olive sprang lightly to her feet. “I don’t feel as if I could survive another minute without something to eat! Thank goodness! There goes the dear bugle, sounding mess-call--dinner--as if we were military maids. Nothing militant about us, is there, except--except our skirmishes with the big seals, to drive them off the bar. ’Twill be low tide in another hour or so. How about rowing over there?”
“Good!” Sesooā looked out towards that long milk-white, level line, a mile in length, the Ipswich Bar, rising steadily inch by inch from the billowy green of the receding tide. Colonies of birds were settling upon it and brown amphibious forms wallowing up out of the water. “Humph!” she gasped suddenly. “Maybe that sportsman--that man who passed a while ago, whose face I have seen somewhere before, is a seal-hunter, down here shooting seals, those spotted hair-seals. He had a gun over his shoulder. Bah! it just makes me cross to see a pair of eyes that I recognize as I recognized his at once, and not--not be able to place them in any head that I remember.”
“Put them out of your own head, honey, and think of the baby carrots,” counseled Olive, slipping an arm through her companion’s. “Lilia and Betty Ayres have a trick of creaming them to perfection; they’re cooks for to-day.”
“Ah, well, perhaps if we should--should--run across him again----” was the low, still haunted rejoinder, absently completed by a backward glance at a camouflaged dory.
CHAPTER VI
PLAYING SUBMARINE
“Ils ne l’aurout plus,
Jamais! Jamais!”