“I wish Nancy could go, too,” Sue exclaimed, suddenly. “She’d love to.”
“Well, Sue, why couldn’t you have thought of it before the last minute,” Polly laughed. She stood still for a minute, and then said in the tone of decision all the girls had learned to know, “Why, of course Nancy can go along with us. She’s a member of our club. Not a resident member, but nevertheless she is a member, and our ‘coach’ in all nautical knowledge.”
“Would your mother let her go, Tom?” asked Kate, practically. Tom grinned happily, and hitched his one suspender up higher.
“Sure she would,” he answered. “And Nancy’s got a best dress too. It’s white with little blue flowers on it, awful pretty.”
Very sweet and fresh Nancy looked in that blue and white sprigged muslin, when she stood in the doorway of the Carey cottage and kissed her mother good-by, while the girls waited for her. It was her very first real “party,” as she said, and her cheeks were rosy with excitement, and her blue eyes shining. Every year she had gone over to the Orienta with Tom to stand down on the shore and look at the gayly-lighted verandas and happy throng, had watched the other children dancing and playing games, and had longed to join them.
“I can’t dance though, Polly,” she said now, as they approached the big white club house with its verandas all hung with Japanese lanterns and festoons of real flowers.
“Oh, yes, you can, too,” Polly assured her. “You can dance a reel. Even a telegraph pole could dance a reel, Nancy. And we girls will dance with you. That’s the way we used to do at Miss Calvert’s.”
Dorothy and Bess were on the lookout for them, and came down to meet them.
“We’re so glad you’ve come,” they cried, happily. “Because we’ve got a real guest of honor from Washington. He’s a friend of papa’s, and he’s the greatest naturalist in the country. Papa calls him the citizen of the world, for he loves all the world, and has been over it ever so many times. Papa says he holds it right in his hand, and pats it. Isn’t that funny?”
“The greatest naturalist in America,” Kate repeated. “From Washington?”