There was a general, wondering laugh, ousting the shudder, as one and another pair of girlish eyes sought the turbaned head of Morning-Glory, the foam-chicken, amid the waves.
Olive spoke first when the puzzled mirth subsided.
“Come up here, little Kitty,” she said. “Sit on the steps—I’m going to dress in a minute; I’m just sunning myself—and tell us what you used to do on the farm where you live and in the orchard. How did you amuse yourself?”
“Mostly I played with the ducks an’ hens—an’ with Mary-Jane Peg,” replied Kitty’s lips and fluttering ribbons gravely.
“He! He! _He!_ Hi!... Ha! Isn’t she too green for anything—the greenest little hayseed, greenest little guy—naming a _pig_ like that?”
No need to ask whence came the tingling titter! Penelope had come up out of the water, too, Penelope of the swinging gate who, in view of her home handicaps and her sisterly service to younger brothers, _had_ been invited by the Guardian of the Morning-Glory Camp Fire to join its circle and camp out, here, with its members.
“He! He! Ha-a-a!” rattled on Penny and, suddenly, in the midst of her stampeding laughter became conscious of a chill, that her mirth and her remark, both, shot wild, skated like pebbles over a frozen surface, grated upon an icy silence.
The chill suddenly started a fever. Desperately she ran down the white beach to hide her burning cheeks in the water.
“I said she had the mild manners of a hurricane—a Caribbean Sea hurricane!” mumbled Captain Andy between puffs of laughter. “Her core is gusty, but it’s good. Well! I must be off to hunt up a chunk o’ birch wood or some other hard wood to whittle it into a big top—otherwise you can’t play that Kullibígan guessing-game to-night. An’ Kitty wants to ask a question of that fortune-telling top, eh, Kitty?” He dropped a wink upon the Doomed One, whose conviction of early death was melting away, like snow in May, into the filmy, sunlight haze that hung over the sand-peaks of the Sugarloaf. “No! you stay here along with the other girls an’ get acquainted. I’ll be back soon.”
But he was not thinking of his grandniece as he walked off to prowl among the dunes; he was philosophizing about girlhood in general. “Girls, even the best of ’em, are freakish. You can’t understand ’em,” he told his masculine old heart. “They cut queer capers, sometimes, just like a vessel! Now, what was the Morning-Glory one doing to-day, sitting an’ looking at herself in that pane o’ glass on her lap—an’ running off without a word as if I caught her, or came near catching her, in a crime? Her eyes looked red, too, when next I met her. And there’s nothing to cry over in her looks; she’s pretty as her name-flower. But”—soliloquizing further to a silvery birch-log, part of the driftwood scattered everywhere among the dunes, as he notched it with his pocket-knife, to test its suitability for a spinner or guessing-top—“but it’s hard for a girl like her to lose both parents before she’s seventeen, to have no regular home an’ no money, be dependent for a while on those who are no kin, as I believe’s the case!”