"Great stuff, you kids, but I am too fat and have to wend my middle-aged way down the sea-ladder," and Mr. Wing did it.
Soon all of them were in, Frances, Mabel and Jane, romping around like young seals, Mabel pursuing the other two, round and round the "Boojum" in her efforts to duck the two teasers.
"It's terrible just to be able to do this silly little side stroke," wailed Ellen to Mr. Wing and Jack, "when all the other girls swim the trudgeon, double overarm and Australian crawl just like professionals."
"Come on, Jack, let's teach her," said the father of one of the envied ducks.
The two men started teaching Ellen the difficult feat of breathing with the head on one side when the arm comes up for the stroke and exhaling with the head under water. Ellen strangled and spluttered about for a while, as beginners do, time after time, reversing the order and breathing in under water and choking when she came up for the breath she was unable to take. After patience on the part of the pupil and teachers, she began making noble attempts to combine the breathing with the actual stroke.
Jane and Frances had clambered up over the stern of the dinghy which had been made fast at the end of the lowered boat-boom and were engaged in a spirited discussion of the value of salt water swimming and the value of fresh water swimming.
"Frances, look! Did you ever see such a beauty in your life?" Jane gasped as she watched a tall, broad-shouldered, slender-hipped figure in a maroon swimming suit poise itself on the extreme end of the bowsprit before making the most perfect jack-knife dive either of the girls had ever seen.
"Whew! the brown of his legs and shoulders against that dark red of his suit was just too beautiful to be true," asserted Frances. "And Jane, do you know who it was? Well, it was Breck and he has no right to be so gorgeous looking."
"He uses perfectly good English, whenever he speaks, which is seldom. What in the world do you suppose he is?" Jane asked.
"I think he is awfully interesting, and I wish I knew something about him. He makes such a point of being just one of the men employed by Mr. Wing that I can't help feeling that he isn't an ordinary sailor, Jane."
"Well, probably if we hadn't seen him make that peach of a jack-knife and he hadn't had that maroon bathing suit but some old faded grey one, we would probably never have given him a second thought, so let's don't anyway. Come on and get dressed, I am hungry as a shark." Jane lightly dismissed the subject that interested her a great deal more than she cared to admit.
