The girls sat with their backs to the paintings. In their laps were a few fern and ice-plant leaves, which by dint of much searching they had gathered under the rocks.
Em took off her big brown kapje and began vigorously to fan her red face with it; but her companion bent low over the leaves in her lap, and at last took up an ice-plant leaf and fastened it on to the front of her blue pinafore with a pin.
“Diamonds must look as these drops do,” she said, carefully bending over the leaf, and crushing one crystal drop with her delicate little nail. “When I,” she said, “am grown up, I shall wear real diamonds, exactly like these in my hair.”
Her companion opened her eyes and wrinkled her low forehead.
“Where will you find them, Lyndall? The stones are only crystals that we picked up yesterday. Old Otto says so.”
“And you think that I am going to stay here always?”
The lip trembled scornfully.
“Ah, no,” said her companion. “I suppose some day we shall go somewhere; but now we are only twelve, and we cannot marry till we are seventeen. Four years, five—that is a long time to wait. And we might not have diamonds if we did marry.”
“And you think that I am going to stay here till then?”
“Well, where are you going?” asked her companion.