The air is so cool here that you forget
how hot the sun is."
"Yes, that's true," assented Corey.
"A good night's rest will make it all right," suggested the Colonel,
without looking round. "But you girls have got to look out."
"If you're fond of walking," said Corey, "I suppose you
find the beach a temptation."
"Oh, it isn't so much that," returned the girl.
"You keep walking on and on because it's so smooth and
straight before you. We've been here so often that we
know it all by heart--just how it looks at high tide,
and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after
a storm. We're as well acquainted with the crabs and
stranded jelly-fish as we are with the children digging
in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas.
I think they're always the same, all of them."
The Colonel left the talk to the young people.
When he spoke next it was to say, "Well, here we are!"
and he turned from the highway and drove up in front
of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof, and a group
of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop
formed by the road. It was treeless and bare all round,
and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little
more than a stone's-cast from the cottage. A hospitable
smell of supper filled the air, and Mrs. Lapham was on
the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her belated
husband's excuses, which she was obliged to check on her
tongue at sight of Corey.
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