“Look! Look! Look!” cried Arline with a frank, glad sob. “I verily believe she thinks Heaven is short an angel to-day, one having dropped down from the clouds, especially to dance with her!”
CHAPTER III
CAPTAIN ANDY TAKES OFF HIS HAT
“Great Neptune! I do declare, she dances as lightly as a Mother Carey chicken balancing upon a wave.”
“You should say, rather, that she dances like a morning-glory in the breeze!” Sesooā looked laughingly up into the face of the massive peacemaker who had separated the two little fighting foreigners; he had delivered them over to the tender mercies of the playground teacher who carried the dripping white water-ball in his arms, while he, the lame stranger whom Jessica opined was a sea-captain, withdrew to a better position for watching the dancing which brought him near to the group under the circular catalpa tree.
“An’ why should I say she dances like a ‘morning-glory,’ may I ask? I don’t know much about flowers, but I know a whole lot about foam-chickens, Carey chickens—stormy petrels you’d call ’em, most likely: and they’re the lightest, most buoyant things on God’s earth! You should see them,” went on the stranger expressively, “with their small wings spread, balancing on a wave-crest, little feet digging down into the foam, never sinking, disappearing into a watery hollow one minute, up again the next, crowing on the top of another foam-hill! I say she dances like that, the girl who’s footing it with the little creature in the broken old shoes and grey frock—as if the wave could never catch her!” There was a little genial mist, like light spray from the stormwater of which he spoke, in the stranger’s eye now, as it followed Jessica and her dumb partner through the last gay stampede of the vineyard dance. “And here’s hoping that the storm-wave never will swallow her!” he added with an eye of such merry fatherly kindness that Sally, part of whose bringing-up it had been not to hold familiar converse with strangers, absolutely forgot to place him in that category and immediately gave her racy little tongue all the freedom it desired.
“That sounds awful-ly nice what you say about her,” she remarked. “And I’ll tell her you said it; she’ll be pleased to hear it because she has made up her mind that you’re a sea-captain and her great-grandfather was one, owned a big ship and sailed out of Newburyport.”
“Ha! The only Newburyport in the United States, with its plaguy sand-bar at the mouth of the Merrimac River, so that ships can sail out of that port, when they’re in ballast, but never put in there, when they’re loaded, after a long voyage!”
“Ye-es,” murmured Sally, not interested. “But fancy thinking so much about one’s great-grandfather! However, I’m going to set to work and look up mine now, my grandparents and great-grandparents an’ what they did—so’s to win a patriotic honor-bead for my Camp Fire Girl’s necklace! But it’s different with her”—volubly indicating the deaf-and-dumb child’s partner, who was now guiding her, with expressive pantomime, through the mazy windings of a ribbon dance—“she thinks so much of that old sea-captain ancestor because she’s got his miniature and because I don’t believe she has any living relatives to think about. Her father and mother are both dead. She’s staying with the Deerings who own that beautiful automobile but I don’t think she’s related to them, except through their elderly cousin”—nodding toward the bench under the catalpa tree—“who’s her cousin, too.”
“What is the girl’s name?” asked the grey-haired peacemaker.