“Want anything over to Eastport?”
“Yes. Mail, potatoes and soap,” called back Polly, with a smile and wave of her hand; then to Dorothy, as if no interruption had occurred, “We’re going out with the Captain for a sail around the Point Light, and down to Tarker’s Light. He said he’d take us if we behaved for a week, and we have. Haven’t been out once in a bad wind, haven’t made any trouble at all, so now we’re going. Why can’t you and Bess stay and have dinner with us, though? We won’t start before two, and Aunty’s making clam pie, Maryland style, and baked, stuffed tomatoes, and peach dumplings.”
“Oh, we’ll stay fast enough,” cried Bess, while Dorothy just smiled. “You do have the best things to eat over here that I know anything about. Papa says he’s coming over some day just to sample them, and find out if it’s really true. Doctor Smith says it is; so papa can’t really tell us out and out that we are coloring it up a little.”
“Tell him we’d be delighted to entertain him any time, and Mrs. Vaughan, too,” exclaimed Polly, with true Southern hospitality. “We’ll have fried sweet potatoes, and fried chicken, and corn fritters, and corn pone, all from Aunty Welcome’s special recipes. She’ll be so proud to get up a dinner and we’d love to have you.”
“Where’s Isabel?” asked Sue suddenly. “Did she go up to dress?”
“No, I’m up here in the hammock. I don’t want to get all freckled in that sunlight,” came Isabel’s tones from the shadiest corner of the porch.
“Pull her forth, girls,” ordered Polly, gaily. “She’s too exclusive. She just wants to set herself up before us as a mirror of style, and we won’t have it. Pull her forth, and walk her in the sun till she’s as freckled as a cowslip. What do you think, Dorothy, this young person wants to wear a bathing cap with a bow on the front and a ruffle around it like an old maid’s nightcap, and she takes a bar of violet scented soap with her into the deep blue sea when she trips down to bathe. It once dropped like a stone down to the bottom, and she never got it.”
“‘Though lost to sight, to memory dear,’” quoted Sue; she linked arms with Ted and sang the refrain over and over with variations, until Isabel put her fingers in her ears and ran for the house. Suddenly the majestic form of Aunty Welcome appeared on the porch, and waved a dish towel at them.
“Ain’t dey nobody at all going to eat clam pie?” she called. “If you all don’t look like a mess ob turtles burrowing in de sand, den I miss my guess. And every one eating watermelon. Well, for de love ob cats! Miss Polly, don’t you know you’s going ter be so freckled dat you can’t find de jining places? You come on up out ob dat sand now, you hyar me?”
“Yes’m,” said Polly, meekly, and the rest trailed after her, for Aunty Welcome’s word was law on Lost Island.