“And the scream like a curlew! Can’t tell you her dressing-up name, Kitty. But her ordinary one is Penelope, with a kind of extraordinary surname: Tingle, an’ gee! she is one big tingle, was about as mild-mannered as a hurricane when she came here first, but she’s simmering down a little, by degrees. See that dark-haired girl who’s sitting on the steps of the biggest camp building—Camp Morning-Glory they call it?” The captain wheeled shoreward and looked toward a scattered trio of new camps, lightly built frame houses, in a curve of the white crescent beach.
“The one who has just come out of the water and taken the handkerchief off her head?” Kitty inquired.
“Yes, she’s one of the rich girls I spoke of. The first time I saw her she talked some frilly stuff about going to an hotel, she and her sister, an’ dancing all summer—something like that—now she foots it an’ sings with the rest of the girls and cooks an’ launders, and learns how to run a motor-boat and pull a good oar, too, an’ thinks it all a lark. Her father has millions, I guess, and wears a mite o’ pink ribbon on his coat that makes him look like a foreign di-plo-mat—I heard him speechify after a public dinner when I was in the city of Clevedon about three weeks ago.”
“What’s that for?” inquired Kitty’s laundered ribbons waving in the sea-breeze and taking the words from her lips.
“The scrap o’ ribbon! Why! to show that his ancestors did truly come over here on the Mayflower—as yours an’ mine did, Kitty, for the matter o’ that, on a bunchy old hooker called the Angel Gabriel. That girl’s name is Olive Deering; her mother was a beautiful Southerner, so I understand, an’ the girl herself is, as a seaman would say, A. I. in p’int of looks from her keel to her truck-head!” Captain Andy chuckled.
A slow swish of wings in the air! A great bird rising majestically from the water’s edge where it had been feeding on fish at a point where the tidal ripples broke gently upon the white sands that gleamed through them like milk in a crystal vase.
Kitty turned eagerly to watch its flight toward the dunes, the white expanse of sand-hills, some of which were sand-snows right to the top that rose to two hundred feet, or thereabouts, above sea level; others shone with the faint pink of delicate flesh owing to the shadow cast by the vegetation, the sparse grass that stood up like the scanty hair on a baby’s head.
The deep hollows between the peaks were pink and purple with the riotous, blossoming beach-pea or emerald with low trees and shrubs, basswood, bitter-sweet, bayberry and barberry.
One sand-valley held a crystal basin left by the tide where a score of sandpipers were bathing.
Over all sailed the magnificent bird—great wings heavily flapping—like a grey slate against the sky, in length measuring about four feet from the tip of its six-inch beak to the end-feather of its insignificant tail, its little yellow eye slanting down sidelong on Kitty, which, of course, she could not see, its long neck gracefully stretched.