"Absolutely," he said enjoyingly. "And so you weren't lonesome?"
Dorothea, who had spent her afternoon in a region peopled with interesting and exquisite figures, shook her head.
"You don't get lonesome when you think," she said—"imagine" was the word she meant; she used the other as appealing to his understanding. Suddenly the vague, introspective look left her face; she turned to him with the expression of one imparting pleasing tidings. "My friend is coming to-morrow to stay a week," she said. "You remember I told you that mother had asked her. Well, she's coming down with father to-morrow. She has never been to the seashore before. You'll take us crabbing, won't you, Amiel? And if we have a bonfire you'll ask father to let us stay up, won't you?"
"Sure," he said good-naturedly. "What's her name?"
"Her name is Jennie Clark, and she lives next door to us in the city, and we're going to have fun—fun—fun," chanted Dorothea. "Come on." She sprang lightly to her feet and dug her shoes and stockings out of the sand. "We can have a game of tennis before dinner."
Clutching her book with her shoes and stockings, she raced with him to the steps that led to the bulkhead, and from that eminence—with the air of one performing an accustomed act—she clambered on the fence that separated the green lawns from beach to avenue. This, with a fine disregard for splinters, she proceeded to walk—her property tucked under her arm.
Amiel strode beside her on the lawn. She was as sure-footed as a goat; but when he clutched her elbow as she performed a daring pirouette, she offered no opposition, but proceeded sedately beneath his hold. Why not? She had ceased to be Dorothea on her way to a tennis game ("Lean heavily on me, dearest," whispered Reginald, "the chapel is in sight. Bear up a little longer"). With a weary sigh the Lady Ursula slid finally from the gate-post to the ground and proceeded to put on her stockings.
Jennie Clark arrived duly and was received, if not rapturously, at least hospitably. To be frank, Jennie Clark was not among those first suggested by Dorothea as a prospective visitor. Of her own private and particular friends some five had been rejected by a too censorious parent, mainly, it seemed, because of a lack of personal charm—Dorothea preferring a good sport from the gutter, as it were, to a dull fairy from a dancing school.
Jennie had been near, perilously near, the end of Dorothea's list. Her sole claims to Dorothea's friendship were that, living next door, she was available on rainy days when greater delights failed, and that Dorothea, by a dramatic relation of a ghost story, could hypnotize her into a terrified and wholly fascinated wreck.
Jennie was thirteen, a very young thirteen—pretty and mindless as a Persian kitten—but developing rapidly a coquettish instinct for the value of a red ribbon in her dark curls, and the set of a bracelet on her plump arm. Beside her curves and curls and pretty frilled frocks, Dorothea, in her straight, blue flannel playing suit or stiff afternoon pique', with her cropped blonde head, suggested nothing so much as wire opposed to a sofa cushion.