"Oh, I'm quite all right. Well, that's your tent, the green-striped one. I'll walk along to the rocks."
She took the escholtzia-hued robe and other fripperies from my arm, nodded smilingly, and passed up the beach.
The Airds and their set bathed, not from the crowded plage of Dinard proper, but in the quieter bay of St Enogat. The beach glistened with minute particles of mica, deposited in moiré patterns as the wavelets had left them, and to touch that sand with your hand was to withdraw it again all infinitesimally spangled. It sparkled like gun-metal in the rocks, floated in suspension in the green water. You would have said that the whole shore had been sown with that metallic powder with which children used to tinsel themselves at Christmas parties.
I crossed the tent-bordered plage towards the rocks. Already a dozen bathers splashed and played. Every contour of wet limb reflected the warm gold, every rubber-capped head had its piercing little flash of sunlight. I looked for Jennie's yellow cap, but did not see it; she was still in the tent whither she had preceded Julia five minutes before. But I saw the Beverley girls, of whose mutual sufficiency Madge so strongly disapproved. Jennie was not to be brought up on those lines....
I lay down on a purple-weeded rock and watched the fruit salad of the bathers. Scattered over the beach where they had dropped them lay their bright wraps, the prints of their sandals patterned the mica. Tank Beverley's head could be seen, a dark dot a quarter of a mile out, and in the green marge two little French children splashed, brown as nuts and innocent of any garment whatever. Their barefooted mother knitted a few yards from where I sat, their father lay by her side with his panama over his face. The sun shone honey-yellow through the wings of the gulls, and far out a little launch crept among the rocks and sent its soft "thut-thut" over the water.
Jennie and Julia were taking rather a long time to get ready, I thought, and I hoped all was well. For Jennie, if the truth must be told, was behaving abominably. She was far, far too submissive and sweet and self-effacing before the older woman—altogether too good to be true—and I happened to know that Madge had taken her to task about it a couple of days before.
"I don't see why you can't call her just Julia if it comes to that," she had rebuked her. "She isn't a hundred, anyway. I do wish you'd stop saying 'Aunt Julia.'"
"I'm very sorry, mother darling. Shall I call her Miss Oliphant?"
As a matter of fact I had not since heard her use any form of address whatever.
It was the third day after Julia's arrival, and my own longest walk since my touch of illness. Without even changing her travelling-things, Julia had come straight up into my room the moment of her arrival at Ker Annic, and, kneeling down by my bed, had taken both my hands into hers.