Esther's eyes became a little anxious.
"But what has been the matter?" she asked.
The governess smiled.
"Oh, nothing very serious," she said. "And I think you must ask Claire herself. Tales out of school, you know."
And then the least tidy, perhaps, of the damsels detached herself suddenly from her comrades, and came down upon us at top speed, regardless of pebbles.
"Have you got me off prep?" she asked earnestly, after she had kissed us and found her shoes and stockings. And having explained to her that we were going to take her out to tea for a pre-birthday treat—she was going to be sixteen next week—we inquired about the bandage. It was the result, we discovered, of an illegal (and unconfirmed) raid upon a neighbouring dormitory, during which, by a kind of Homeric retribution, a stray tin-tack had wounded her unprotected foot.
"But it's about well now, I should think," she said, undoing the bandage, and turning up a salmon-pink sole for our inspection. And we were obliged to confess that it was.
She rolled up the bandage into a little ball, and threw it down the beach.
"I wish we could always go barefoot," she sighed. And for the moment I felt inclined to agree with her. For the happy foot, as T. E. Brown has said, swings rather from the heart than from the hip. And there are few prettier things in nature than the restless, romping legs of the average healthy little maiden. They are her life's joy made visible; so that it really seems a shame, if a necessary one, to imprison them in even the airiest of stockings and the most hygienic of leather shoes.