When Mr. Dugald returned for dinner he had to hear how nearly Sidney had come to going home. “Why, that’s the worst thing I’ve heard,” he exclaimed with exaggerated alarm, “Now, you wouldn’t really go and do that, would you?” His eyes laughed above the serious twist of his lips; Sidney wondered if he was remembering that first night of her coming.
“I think we ought to celebrate this crisis through which we have lived,” he declared. “What say to a picnic supper over at the backside and a call upon Captain Nelson. He’ll be expecting us about this time. If I commandeer Pete Cady’s Ford you can go, too, Aunt Achsa.”
When he was in his rollicking mood Aunt Achsa could never resist her Mr. Dugald. Though she’d as soon trust herself in one of “them ar-y-planes” as in Pete Cady’s Ford, which only went under stress of many inward convulsions and ear-splitting explosions, she accepted Mr. Dugald’s invitation and fell at once to planning the “supper,” though their dinner was not yet cleared away.
“I’ll write a letter and mail it and then stop and tell Mart. Mart may go, may she not?” Sidney asked anxiously.
Yes, Mart must go, too. Plainly the occasion was a momentous one.
And to Trude Sidney wrote, hastily, for Lavender was waiting and there would be time for a swim on the Arabella before they started off in the Ford.
“—Aunt Achsa and Lavender both want me to stay very much. They like me and I am just one of the family. I help Aunt Achsa too, in a great many ways and Lavender and I are like pals—it’s just as though I had a brother which I never thought would be any fun but now I know it would be a lot especially if the brother was a twin. You must not worry when I do not write often for there is so much to do that I don’t have a bit of time—”
And in her excited state of mind Sidney forgot to tell Trude about her shorn braids.
CHAPTER XIII
PLOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS
Rockman’s Wharf was the center of the fishing activities of the town. To it, each day, the small fishermen came in their dories with their day’s catch. From it motor boats chugged off to the bigger boats moored in the bay, some schooner was always tied to the gray piles waiting to be overhauled or to be chartered for deep sea fishing. There was always something to watch on Rockman’s, or someone to talk to. The fishing folk spent their leisure hours loafing in the shadow of the long shed, smoking and talking; often the artists boldly pitched their easels and stools in everyone’s way and painted a gray hull and a pink-gray sail, checkered with white patches, or a dark-skinned Portuguese bending to the task of spiking shiny cod from the bottom of a dory and throwing them to the wharf to be measured and weighed.