Her day dream thus rudely interrupted, Constance Stevens laughingly resigned herself to Marjorie's energetic commands, and, now thoroughly awake to the important business at hand, tried her best to follow her friend's instructions. A fifteen minutes' lesson in the art of learning to float followed, and at the end of that time, by common consent, the two girls waded ashore and flung themselves on the warm sand.
"I'll never learn to swim. I feel it in my bones," asserted Constance, as she lazily rose, wrung the water from her bathing suit and seated herself on the white beach beside Marjorie, who lay stretched at full length, her head propped upon her elbows, her alert gaze upon the few bathers who were disporting themselves in the water.
"Then your bones are false prophets," declared Marjorie calmly. "You know how to float already, and that's half the battle. We'll rest a little and talk some more, and then we'll try it again. Next time I'll teach you an easy stroke. Isn't it funny, Connie, we never seem to get 'talked out.' We've been here together five whole weeks and yet there always seems to be something new to say. You are really a most entertaining person."
"That's precisely my opinion of you." Constance's blue eyes twinkled.
The two girls laughed joyously. Two wet hands stretched forth and met in a loving little squeeze.
"It's been wonderful to be here with you, Marjorie. Last year at this time I never dreamed that anything so wonderful could possibly happen to me." The golden-haired girl's voice was not quite steady.
"And I've loved being here with you. What a lot of things can happen in a year," mused Marjorie. "Why, at this time last year I never even knew that there was a town called Sanford on the map, and when I found out there was really such a place, and that I was going to live there instead of staying in B—— and going to Franklin High, I felt perfectly awful about it."
It had, indeed, been a most unhappy period for sunny, lovable Marjorie Dean when the call of her father's business had made it necessary for him to remove his family from the beautiful city of B——, where Marjorie had been born and lived sixteen untroubled years of life, to the smaller northern city of Sanford, where she didn't know a soul.
All that happened to Marjorie Dean from the first day in her new home has been faithfully recorded in "Marjorie Dean, High School Freshman." In that narrative was set forth her trials, which had been many, and her triumphs, which had been proportionately greater, as a freshman in Sanford High School. How she had become acquainted with Constance Stevens and how, after never-to-be-forgotten days of storm and sunshine, the friendship between the two young girls had flowered into perfect understanding, formed a story of more than ordinary interest.
Now, after several happy weeks at the seashore, where the Deans had rented a cottage and were spending their usual summer outing with Constance as their guest, the two friends were enjoying the last perfect days of mid-summer before returning to Sanford, where, in September, Constance and Marjorie were to enter the delightful realm of the sophomore, to which they had won admission the previous June.