“Frances, look! Did you ever see such a beauty in your life?” Jane gasped as she watched a tall, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped figure in a maroon swimming suit poise itself on the extreme end of the bowsprit before making the most perfect jack-knife dive either of the girls had ever seen.
“Whew! the brown of his legs and shoulders against that dark red of his suit was just too beautiful to be true,” asserted Frances. “And Jane, do you know who it was? Well, it was Breck and he has no right to be so gorgeous looking.”
“He uses perfectly good English, whenever he speaks, which is seldom. What in the world do you suppose he is?” Jane asked.
“I think he is awfully interesting, and I wish I knew something about him. He makes such a point of being just one of the men employed by Mr. Wing that I can’t help feeling that he isn’t an ordinary sailor, Jane.”
“Well, probably if we hadn’t seen him make that peach of a jack-knife and he hadn’t had that maroon bathing suit but some old faded grey one, we would probably never have given him a second thought, so let’s don’t anyway. Come on and get dressed, I am hungry as a shark.” Jane lightly dismissed the subject that interested her a great deal more than she cared to admit.
CHAPTER V
AT THE LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS
“I feel just exactly like the Pilgrim Fathers, don’t you, Mr. Wing?” Jane said as she and Frances climbed up the wharf ladder from the dinghy.
These two girls and Mr. Wing had grown to be the closest of friends and it had become a habit for them to take the little dinghy when the party went ashore, leaving the tender for the others. Mr. Wing had proved himself a delightful companion. In fact, as Frances said: “He is every bit as crazy as we are.”