Some one had come sliding pell-mell down the nearest sand-peak and reaching him in a rush, flung her arms around him, or tried to. Well might he exclaim!
Kitty, not in Indian dress, although her hair hung in two chestnut braids down her back! But a Kitty in olive-green bloomers silvered with sand! Kitty in a middy blouse too large for her—her sleeves rolled up—with the brightest dancing eyes and a delicate pink flush burnishing the gold of the freckles on her cheeks!
“Don’t tell Mary-Jane Peg,” implored Kitty, quaintly, looking down at her bloomers; “she’d be shocked.”
“Oh, land!” The captain simply roared.
“Sybil lent me these—wasn’t it good of her?” The Doomed One thrust forward one bloomered leg, into whose bagginess her orchard scares had evidently run to hide and had lost themselves. “Sally lent me the blouse,” glancing at her companion, in ceremonial dress, who had slid down the sand-hill with her, and whose arms were full of fuel gathered among the dunes, dead, silvery limbs of juniper, with driftwood and wreckwood. “Oh, Uncle Andy, I’m having such a good time! I’ve made up my mind that I want to be a Camp Fire Girl; you can order the dress an’—an’ fixin’s for me any time you want to!” saucily.
“Good life! can I? You jumped to it pretty quickly, didn’t you?” as if he were addressing the dancing minnow in Kitty’s eyes.
“It’s not surprising that she should swallow the new bait so quickly,” he muttered in an aside to the Guardian of the Camp Fire whose tender eyes rested upon this new recruit’s transformed face. “There are no children in the two families living nearest to her father’s old-fashioned farmhouse with the gambrel roof and T-shaped chimney. And those that she went to school with she didn’t take to—though she ought to have been forced to do so—these girls have made her take to them; they’ve burned up her shyness, somehow.”
“Kitty is learning that ‘it is the discovery of ourselves outside ourselves which makes us glad,’” quoted Gheezies the gracious Guardian, with the little feathery rings of grey hair, light as thistle-fluff among her dark locks, playing about her pearly head-band. “She sees herself reflected in each one of these girls with whom she has come in contact under circumstances novel enough to open her eyes to the reflection and already she’s a new Kitty. Already she’s sharing the team spirit, the joy of doing things together!” looking down on the slender, withered arms of juniper which Kitty had been gathering, too, among the sand-hills and had flung down in her rush upon her great-uncle.
Not one frowning face left a mote on that shining mirror of girlhood in which Kitty saw her own heart, its natural aims and desires, not Penelope’s even; Penelope had been rather quiet ever since she hid her laugh, her graceless tongue and flaming cheeks in the water.
“I’m going up among the dunes to gather some more wood,” she announced now. “We haven’t nearly enough to make a good fire to cook our supper and have it burn on and on in a jolly Council Fire afterward,” looking at the wigwam-like heap of fuel already piled upon the sands.