"So she did," answered Mrs Wilkie. "That's--dear me! how bad my memory is growing!"
"Miss Naylor," volunteered her mother. "Niece of Joseph Naylor of Jones's Landing."
"The great lumberman? In--deed!" said Mrs Petty, interested and impressed. "I did not hear of her arrival. I wonder if he is coming! The richest bachelor in Upper Canada, I understand. It is a risky business, but still----. One likes to see a celebrity."
"He is here," his sister-in-law observed. "We arrived this afternoon."
Mrs Petty turned her eyes, and for the first time permitted them to be seen resting on the stranger, addressing her with much politeness at the same time. "Then perhaps you are related to the beautiful girl who is dancing with my son?"
"She is my daughter Margaret. I am Mrs Caleb Naylor."
"So happy to know you, Mrs Naylor," and forthwith the mothers conversed freely across Mrs Wilkie and over her head, on subjects in which it was impossible for her to join, though many were her abortive attempts to put in an oar. Even Mrs Naylor, whose chit-chat she had stifled with her taciturnity half an hour before, was now grown deaf and unresponsive to anything she could say.
CHAPTER IV.
[THE PERILS OF SURF-BATHING].
When the day is young and the sky is blue, with just a flake or two of cloud low down on the horizon; when the sea, in purple slumber like a dreaming child, is brightened by the flickering glance and shadow on its rippling swell--and the surf, cresting itself in a wall of translucent green, leaps up and curls and topples over, crumbling in snow-white foam upon the sand; when the breeze, still gleeful with the memory of dew and starlit revels overnight, flits fresh and crisp beneath the early sunshine,--it is then that it is good to be a dweller by the shore: to spring from the unconsciousness of sleep into the luxury of sentient being, with softly fanning airs curling about the limbs, and wakening in them all their suppleness and strength.