CHAPTER XVIII
THE BEGINNING OF TRAGEDY
While Jane and Mabel sat in the sun leaning comfortably against the friendly dune, a group of people came towards their retreat from the crowded bathing beach.
“Goodness, I wish they would stay away from here,” grumbled Mabel. “I’m still panting for breath and I certainly don’t want to move.”
“I reckon they won’t bother us if we don’t bother them,” suggested Jane. “It looks like a swell bunch.”
“That’s what I’ve got against them. How can a body eat before such elegance and Charlie and Breck will be back soon with food, I am thinking. That’s a pretty girl in the Vanity Fair bathing suit and scarlet cap—and look at the old gent in yachting togs! He must be postmaster general of all the railroads or something grand. He looks as though he owned the island and was thinking about annexing the ocean.”
“He doesn’t seem to take much pleasure in his possessions,” laughed Jane. “He looks sad to me.”
The gentleman in question was a powerfully built man of about sixty, with iron gray hair, piercing blue eyes, a high Roman nose that seemed to flaunt its aristocratic lines and a mouth and jaw of such force and determination that Jane wondered at the impertinence of a wave that, having leaped on the back of one of its brothers, came tumbling in all out of order, wetting the immaculate white shoes of the nabob. He looked indignant but evidently felt it to be beneath his notice.
Behind him trooped a crowd of young people, five girls and two young men. The old gentleman was the only one not in bathing costume.
“This is a good place to go in, Father,” said the pretty girl in the Vanity Fair suit. “I simply could not have gone in with that common crowd up there.”
“Humph!” whispered Mabel, “that must be the princess.”