“Yes, but I wish she didn’t keep awake with such a din,” said the judge. After all, he admired Lottie’s judgment about the rooms, and he censured her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.
“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. “Do you want to be in Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard’s back-yard.”
“No,” said the judge, mildly, “this is very nice.”
“It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don’t care how much she sits on the sands and dream. I’ll love to see her.”
The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton’s preoccupations of the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her in cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and, with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure, wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting in their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they had pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little girls ran, making mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne, because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne’s complaints, and continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation; she patronized her family as much for the table d’hote at luncheon as for the comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there was not a Cook’s tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly every other kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she had acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their native or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration, vivid intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting through with people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was perhaps her best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple aliens were still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick of them all, and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young men in Tuskingum.
The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge’s London banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together, and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton cared nothing about Lottie’s letters, but she was silently uneasy about the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to her.
“It isn’t from Bittridge, at any rate,” she said to her husband, in the speculation which she made him share. “I am always dreading to have her find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I’m afraid, and now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn’t, though, of course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to her?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don’t like to seem to be following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think.”
Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after waiting a day or two, Mrs. Kenton could not refrain from asking her.