“Ah, that's an old friend,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I remember hearing of that coloured lady when I was a girl. But it's a fine flight of the imagination. What else did they sing?”
“I can't remember. But there was something they danced—to show how a rheumatic old coloured uncle dances.”
He jumped nimbly up, and sketched the stiff and limping figure he had seen. It was over in a flash. He dropped down again, laughing.
“Oh, how wonderfully good!” cried Mrs. Brinkley, with frank joy. “Do it again.”
“Encore! Oh, encore!” came from the people on the beach.
Mavering jumped to his feet, and burlesqued the profuse bows of an actor who refuses to repeat; he was about to drop down again amidst their wails of protest.
“No, don't sit down, Mr. Mavering,” said the lady who had introduced the subject of ham. “Get some of the young ladies, and go and gather some blueberries for the dessert. There are all the necessaries of life here, but none of the luxuries.”
“I'm at the service of the young ladies as an escort,” said Mavering gallantly, with an infusion of joke. “Will you come and pick blueberries under my watchful eyes, Miss Pasmer?”
“They've gone to pick blueberries,” called the lady through her tubed hand to the people on the beach, and the younger among them scrambled up the rocks for cups and bowls to follow them.
Mrs. Pasmer had an impulse to call her daughter back, and to make some excuse to keep her from going. She was in an access of decorum, naturally following upon her late outbreak, and it seemed a very pronounced thing for Alice to be going off into the woods with the young man; but it would have been a pronounced thing to prevent her, and so Mrs. Pasmer submitted.