Driving parties to Nantasket, Cohasset, and along the beautiful "Jerusalem Road" made those afternoons lively which were not still more pleasantly spent on the yacht which the young Deans had brought down for the summer. Phyllis had been taken to the sea from her earliest summers, but it chanced that this one was the first in which she tasted the joys of sailing, and, as she wrote home, she "discovered that she had been born web-footed." There were long, beautiful days, in which Mrs. Dean excused her from all her duties, and a party of ten to fifteen young folk would start off in the morning, with the younger Mrs. Dean for chaperon, and sail to some definite point, fish, make their chowder on board, and come back on the afternoon tide, burned, sticky, salted by the wind and spray, but happy as robins, and sleepy with a peculiarly delicious sleepiness that made cool linen sheets inexpressibly refreshing.
Phyllis was the kind of sailor that a skipper loves--never afraid, happiest when the boat was "on her ear" and the waves breaking over the deck, but contented and cheerful in a calm, and not getting hysterical in thundershowers, and, above all, proof against seasickness, even in the long "ground swell" and the broiling sun.
One day, Rick and his sisters, three girls ranging from fifteen to nineteen, Alan Armstrong, Phyllis, Rick's mother, a young Scotchman named David Campbell, and two more of Rick's and Alan's college chums, with three girl friends of the Deans, started out on the _Saxon_ for a day's sailing. The plan was to sail down to the Lower Light, fish off the Brewsters during the turn of the tide, make a chowder of the perch and small cod caught there, and return, with a favorable breeze, just late enough to catch the young moon not yet ending its first quarter.
David Campbell was a new element in the party, and one dreaded by all the rest. First of all, he was but just over from the "land of bannocks," and his speech was not as intelligible as English speech might be expected to be. Then he was lame, and there were many subjects engrossing to gay young people, such as sports of all kinds, which must be avoided out of consideration for one debarred from them. And, above all, nobody had the faintest idea what he cared most about; which, added to his burry speech, made conversation formidable. But he had been committed to the elder Mrs. Dean by an old friend who had been good to her when she was in Scotland, and she had laid the strictest injunctions on her kindred to honor to their utmost the draft made upon her.