"All boys!" exclaimed Prudence.
Jerry nodded. There had been nine Outram boys before the war! "Let's go out on the raft again—please," he added, with a wink at Grizzel, who smiled back. "You come too; we could easily push you along."
"We'll have to change into our bathing things first," said Prudence; "the raft looks a little wet. We won't be long."
The girls ran up into the sandhills to change, but before Prue disappeared she returned to the boys with a basket made of rushes in her hand, which she had begged from Bridget.
"Here are some buns and grapes," she said a little shyly, "I thought you might be feeling hungry, and it is a long time yet till tea-time."
Jerry decided on the spot that if he ever did go in for the peculiar entertainment of falling in love, he would choose a shy girl with brown curls who did not talk slang and went about distributing buns to hungry boys. "Her for mine," he expressed it to himself.
The girls were soon back, all in navy-blue bathing-suits, knickers below, and a belted tunic reaching to their knees above—too much clothed for Mollie's taste; she liked to be skimpy when she went swimming. But no one grumbles after they have been in a Circle—at least, not for the next twenty-four hours—so Mollie endured her substantial garments philosophically and soon forgot all about them.
The girls waded out to the raft, which the boys had launched. They climbed on board and were soon in fairly deep water. Mollie and Prudence slipped off and left lazy Grizzel alone on deck, sitting cross-legged like a little tailor, one arm flung round the mast. The raft rocked gently up and down on the calm sea, while the children swam, ducked, and played about in the clear, sun-warmed water like a school of young porpoises. As Grizzel sat idly watching the rest, her eyes fell upon an object which floated at a little distance from the raft. It was a bottle—a common beer-bottle—its cork rammed well in and sealed with red wax.
"What's that?" she called to Hugh, pointing to the bottle as it danced about, twirling round and round, tossing from side to side in the wide ripples sent out by the children and the drifting raft.
They all made for it. "It's a message from the deep," cried Jerry; "probably from a ship-wrecked sailor."