“Why, Sunny Boy!” Mother’s voice was distinctly surprised. “Here Daddy left you to look after me, and you make a fuss the very first thing I ask you to do. What do you suppose he would say to that?”
“I’m going,” announced Sunny Boy, scrambling to his feet. “I’m going this minute, Mother. Can I have a cracker?”
“‘May I have a cracker?’” corrected Mrs. Horton. “Well, just one. We’re going to have an early lunch.”
“All right. Then I’ll tell Harriet just one cracker.”
Sunny Boy ran over the hot sand, up to the bathhouse, and rubbed so hard with the rough towels that he was as dry and clean as could be in the shortest possible time. He put on his sailor suit and went to his room to brush his hair.
“Mother says I may have one cracker, please,” he reported to Harriet, whom he found setting the table in the dining-room.
“’Tis a pink nose, you have,” Harriet told him frankly. “Never mind, you’ll be brown as a berry before your father comes down Saturday. Here’s your cracker now.”
Sunny Boy ran down again to the beach and had time to help Ellen and Ralph build a schoolhouse in the sand before Mrs. Horton and the two aunts—for Aunt Betty had not stayed in the water many minutes after Sunny Boy came out—gathered up their magazines and sewing and started back to the bungalow for lunch.
“Sunny Boy,” said Mother at the table—and, by the way, Sunny Boy sat in Daddy’s place when he wasn’t there and tried his best to behave as the man of the house should—“if you take a nap this afternoon, you may sit up to-night for a couple of hours and go with us down on the beach.”
Now, Sunny Boy was not fond of taking naps, and since his fifth birthday he had been gradually skipping them, since Mother thought that if a laddie went to bed early every night and was not cross during the day he might manage nicely without sleeping in the afternoon. A cross boy needed a nap—that was what Mother always said.