“I didn’t see you until you stood up,” Jane told him.
“No wonder, my clothes are just the color of the rocks. I sometimes feel that I am really part of this island, do you know,” Frederick Gray said with a trace of wistfulness. “We watched your yacht come in the other night. I was afraid you would go away without my seeing any of you.”
Jane wondered who “we” were. She had an odd feeling that the boy was the only person who stayed on the island, for as he had said, he did seem such a part of it.
Her wonder was short lived, for as she and Breck and the boy went up a narrow rocky path, approaching the first of the group of houses, two tow-headed little boys emerged from the bushes and ran scuttling into the open door of the house.
Breck called after them reassuringly, “Hey, Buddies! Come back, we won’t hurt you!”
Frederick Gray smiled and told them that they were his youngest brothers and that they were afraid because they weren’t used to seeing anybody but his mother and father and his oldest sister.
“She is away at school now, so they will probably be afraid of her when she comes back.”
“What in the world is she doing away at school this time of the year?” said Jane, in surprise.
“I meant college; she is at Columbia in the summer school,” the boy explained, adding rather proudly, “I am going to New York and live with her this winter, because Daddy wants me to go to Horace Mann before I go to Yale.”