“Of course I do, Genie,” answered the boy, flushing as red as his ruddy upstanding hair.
“But I don’t want to lose my new friends just as I have made them,” continued the charming girl, changing the subject quickly and smiling into Billie’s face. “Perhaps you will go with us?”
“Oh, may we?” cried Billie and Nancy in one voice.
Mary and Elinor were no swimmers.
“Where are your mammas, then, so that I may ask permission first?” demanded Miss Martin.
“We haven’t but one with us and she’s a cousin, but here she is,” replied Billie.
Miss Martin had the easy gracious manners of the South and she never permitted any one in her company to feel awkward or strange for long. She introduced herself and her friend, Timothy Peppercorn, to Miss Campbell simply and gracefully, and after a moment’s pleasant chat she had learned Miss Campbell’s name and the names of the four girls, and the swimming party was arranged.
“How quickly things do happen once they begin,” thought Billie, as she ran lightly into the surf where they chose to bathe instead of going to the pool which most people preferred. “If old Mrs. Paxton-Steele, of England, hadn’t been so quarrelsome with the chambermaid this morning, we should never have stared at her on the piazza. She would probably have passed us by without noticing us at all. Then, we should not have made friends with Miss Martin and that funny Timothy-boy, and no one would have suggested this glorious morning swim.”
She plunged under the foamy crest of a cool green wave, rose breast high on another, shook herself like a young water spaniel and made for the raft with long overhand strokes.
Swimming was a real accomplishment with Billie, although her father, who had brought her up very much as he would have reared a son, had not taught her this particularly boyish pastime. She had learned to swim at the age of five from an old peasant woman in a village on the coast of Brittany, where they had spent a summer. These old fisherwomen were the only swimming masters on that sequestered beach. Billie could still remember with something of a shiver the ancient, gnarled creature with her skirts tucked up about her wrinkled limbs, who, standing waist-high in the water, had taught her the first strokes. Hard as it had seemed at the time, she had never ceased to be thankful for those early lessons.