“Mother was only joking about the wooden shoes, ducky,” she comforted. “But I have heard of people finding money on the sands; and I’m rather a good looker. I nearly always find things. Shall I help?”
“Y-yes, please,” said Sally, smiling through the end of a sob.
And as Andy looked at them, all the dreams came back that he had known before—only glorified because she was there; and the protecting tenderness that marked her out always from other girls seemed to him now so beautiful that he adored it in her, as men for ages past have adored it in the symbol of all loving womanhood.
“I’ll search too,” was all he said, however.
“Come,” said Elizabeth, drying Sally’s eyes with a little handkerchief that smelt of violets, “here’s Mr. Deane going to help as well. We’re certain to find some pennies now.”
It was an entrancing game, after that, to hide pennies and then sixpences under little brown heaps of seaweed behind Sally’s back while one or other of them engaged her attention, and then to hear her shrieks of joy as she pounced upon them. It might almost be said that she became young again as she flung herself down on the sand and grubbed excitedly under a partly decayed starfish.
“Ugh! Don’t touch that!” said Elizabeth. “Look here. Here’s another penny.”
And that proved to be the last, for the other children were shouting that it was time for dinner, and Mrs. Simpson was beckoning with a peremptory umbrella from her seat on the sand-hills.
“Anyway,” said Sally, tying up the booty in her microscopic handkerchief—“Anyway, there’ll be enough to buy real boots for Jimmy. I don’t know what we should do with him if he had to wear anything that people shouted—he’d never stop fighting. And the policeman might get him after all.”
There gleamed out the preoccupation of Sally’s existence—the endeavour to prevent Jimmy’s behaviour reaching a pass where the often-threatened policeman really would do his duty.