Then she caught her breath with an amazed start, like Captain Andy’s when he saw the same sort of thing; a third sunbeam was surveying himself under difficulties in a sheet of glass about the size of a small window-pane, which looked as if it had been floured over, dulled and whitened by a very watery paste of some kind.
“Gee whiz!” exclaimed Sally who thought that she had eschewed slang with Penelope before her eyes as a horrible example. “What are you doing with the pane of glass, Jessica dearie, mixing biscuits on it?” with a low explosion of laughter.
“No-o,” mumbled the owner of the flowerbed who, with face averted from the intruder, looked rather like a glossy, green shrub trained and clipped into fantastic shape, of the style which, once upon a time, presided over old-fashioned gardens; for her sweater of dark green wool and her Camp Fire Girl’s Tam O’Shanter finished with an emerald pompon matched in hue her olive-green khaki skirt—all of which apparently failed to create a verdant atmosphere of spring in her young heart at present.
“Are you trying cookery experiments on the glass?” laughed Sesooā, much mystified and excitingly tickled by curiosity, for her roving gaze now took in among the litter of articles on the sands a little earthenware crock with a paste that looked like very thin, dyspeptic dough in it. “Olive—Blue Heron—says that her father used to declare that her cookery ought to be tried upon the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before human beings were allowed to partake of it—that was before she became a Camp Fire Girl—but you’re testing it on the pane of glass. Why! Jess—Jessica—Morning-Glory—I didn’t mean to tease you, honey; you’re not peeved with me for finding you here all alone and feeling blue, are you?” Sesooā flung herself upon her knees on the wind-ruffled sand and slipped an arm around the green shoulders of her Camp Fire Sister whose breast was again ploughed by random sobs.
Sally—the little oriole of the city playground—was gay in throat and inquisitive as that orange-and-black songster, but she was wonderfully soft of heart, too; she bit her lip and puckered up her eye-corners, determined that, if she could help it, a Camp Fire Sister should not weep alone any more than she should stand alone.
Then in the space of one long breath her working face was smoothed out as if an electric iron passed over it. Her glance had fallen again upon the dauby comic picture of the blue creek and the boat with half-formed human figures, some of which were being wildly shot into the air by a dragon-like seal.
“Ha! you were painting that—our ducking in ’Loaf Creek—for little Rebecca, weren’t you?” Caressingly she dropped her chin upon the green heave of Morning-Glory’s shoulders. “You’re going to send it to her, eh? But surely you’re not crying about her? She probably doesn’t realize that she’s deaf-and-dumb, different from other children. And you’ve done so much for her, dearie, saving her life and all—the Eagle Scout only came in on the tail-end of the rescue. And you can do more when we go back to the city.”
“Oh! what d’you take me for? F-Fudge! I’m not crying about her—I’m not so—so soft—what earthly g-good would it do her?”
The Morning-Glory’s broken accents were snappish, scraping against a rasp within.
“Well! you needn’t eat me up for suggesting it.” Sally withdrew her chin and made a face at the green shoulders whose back was still toward her. “I’m going away if you’re as cross as a thorn!”