“Yes—and, Jessica honey!” Sesooā crept close to her Camp Fire Sister, her voice a loving croon. “If the new Mrs. Deering shouldn’t really want you to stay on in the Deering Mansion, as it’s called, why! you can come to us—Father an’ Mother would love to have you—for a long visit. They’re so dear!” with a yearning quaver in the voice. “Our home isn’t grand like the Deerings’—but——”
“But ‘your heart’s right there,’ isn’t it?”
The two girls clung together upon the cloudy beach while the rising southwester footed it round them.
CHAPTER XIII
WIND AGAINST TIDE
“As bravely as we can!”
Jessica chanted the words to her painted oars, bright, talkative oars that spoke through many vivid emblems painted on blade and handle by herself and her Camp Fire Sisters.
A tongue of flame licked the dripping blade of one of them, mocking the water in which it was dipped, where Sesooā had gaudily painted her Camp Fire symbol, so characteristic of the little fire-witch who had mastered the art of getting fire without matches.
“Dear little Sally! if I could love one girl of our Morning-Glory Camp Fire better than another ’twould be Sally, next to Olive!” So said the girl-rower to herself, answering the appeal of the spray-feathered flame. “And ’twas so nice of her to go off and leave me to myself for a little while after I’d told her all my story—what I was crying about—I do feel a step happier for telling her!” smiling tremulously. “Her going will give me time for just half-an-hour’s row, alone, before dinner. And the water isn’t very rough near shore, though there’s a wild tumble of tide out in the middle of the river. This sou’wester is a ripping breeze!”
Thus the would-be designer of a painted window, enshrining the form of a Camp Fire Girl and consecrated to her ideals, soliloquized as she, Jessica Dee Holley, rowed briskly out from the Sugarloaf shore toward the wild-looking water that foamed and leaped at the broad heart of the tidal river.