Stories from Everybodys Magazine, 1910 | Page 4

and "dove." Of these one was impossible and two were trite. Scowling fiercely at the ocean, she finally gave the bird to the hungry line and repeated the final couplet doubtfully:
" `Farewell,' he said. `Ah, love, my love, My heart is breaking for thee, Dove.' "
"Look out!" said a voice above her. "I'm going to jump."
Dorothea sat up delightedly, with her bare, brown legs tucked beneath her, Turk-like, as she welcomed him. ("Ah! Beloved," said Lady Ursula with her hand on her fluttering heart.) "Hello," said Dorothea, with a wide grin.
He flung himself down beside her and surveyed her with amusement. "Been digging holes with your head?" he asked affably. "Your hair and eyelashes look it. Been here all the afternoon?"
"Yes," she said. "I saw you go riding after lunch. I've been here ever since. I love to be on the beach when there isn't a lot of people bothering around. Then"--she made a wide gesture with her brown hand-- "all of it seems to belong to me, not broken up in little bits for everybody." She shook her cropped head vigorously, and the sand pelted down her shoulders.
"Well," he said, watching this operation, "you came near taking your little bit to the house with you to keep, didn't you? How long have you worn your hair cropped like that, Dorothea? Was it when you decided to be captain of a ball team?"
He drew a box of chocolates from his pocket and tossed it over to her. She caught it neatly on her outstretched palm, as a boy would have done, and nibbled squirrel-like as she talked. She did not resent being teased by Amiel--she liked it, rather, as representing a perfect understanding between them. Also, once removed from the high hills of romance, she was not devoid of humor.
"It was cut in June--before you came. They didn't want me to, but I just begged them. It was such a nuisance bathing and then flopping about drying afterward, and being sent upstairs all day long to make it smooth."
"You funny kid," he said. "You don't care how you look, do you? You ought to have been a boy. What have you been doing down here all by yourself?"
"Reading--and--listening," said Dorothea vaguely. She folded Godey's Lady Book tightly to her chest. Lady Ursula or no Lady Ursula, she would have died--with black, bitter shame at the thought of any eye but her own falling upon the penciled lines therein. The horror of ridicule is the black shadow that hangs over youth. That strange, inner world of her own Dorothea shared with nothing more substantial than her dreams.
"Listening?" he inquired.
"To the ocean," explained Dorothea. "It was high tide when I came down, and the waves boom-boomed like that, as though it were saying big words down in its chest, you know."
"And what were the wild waves saying?"
"Oh, big words like--" she thought a moment, her small, sunburnt face serious and intent. "Oh, like
"Robert of Sicily, Brother of Pope Urbane And Valmond, Emperor of Allemaine."
she intoned deeply. "You see?"
"Absolutely," he said enjoyingly. "And so you weren't lonesome?"
Dorothea, who had spent her afternoon in a region peopled with interesting and exquisite figures, shook her head.
"You don't get lonesome when you think," she said--"imagine" was the word she meant; she used the other as appealing to his understanding. Suddenly the vague, introspective look left her face; she turned to him with the expression of one imparting pleasing tidings. "My friend is coming to-morrow to stay a week," she said. "You remember I told you that mother had asked her. Well, she's coming down with father to-morrow. She has never been to the seashore before. You'll take us crabbing, won't you, Amiel? And if we have a bonfire you'll ask father to let us stay up, won't you?"
"Sure," he said good-naturedly. "What's her name?"
"Her name is Jennie Clark, and she lives next door to us in the city, and we're going to have fun--fun--fun," chanted Dorothea. "Come on." She sprang lightly to her feet and dug her shoes and stockings out of the sand. "We can have a game of tennis before dinner."
Clutching her book with her shoes and stockings, she raced with him to the steps that led to the bulkhead, and from that eminence--with the air of one performing an accustomed act--she clambered on the fence that separated the green lawns from beach to avenue. This, with a fine disregard for splinters, she proceeded to walk--her property tucked under her arm.
Amiel strode beside her on the lawn. She was as sure-footed as a goat; but when he clutched her elbow as she performed a daring pirouette, she offered no opposition, but proceeded sedately beneath his hold. Why not? She had ceased to be Dorothea on her way to a tennis game ("Lean heavily on