“Gee!  ’Ain’t you got a swell bunch of hair!”

She shook and fluffed it.  “You ought to seen it before I had typhoid.  I could sit on it then.”

“That Phoebe Snow model that I got in mind for Lillian Russell would make you look like a queen, with that hair of yourn!”

She buried his arm in the sand and patted the mound.  “Now,” she said, “I got you, and you can’t do anything without askin’ me.”

“You got me, anyway,” he said, with an expressive glance.

“Yes,” she purred, “that’s what you say now; but when you get back to New York you’ll forget all about the little girl you met down at the shore.”

“That’s all you know about me.  I don’t take up with every girl.”

“I’m glad you don’t,” she said.

“But I’ll bet you got a different fellow for every day when you’re in New York.”

“Nothin’ like that,” she said; “but, anyway, there’s always room for one more.”

Two young men without hats passed.  Miss Sternberger called out her greeting.

“Hello, Manny!  Wasn’t the water grand?  What?  Well, you tell Leo he don’t know nothin’.  No, we don’t want to have our pictures taken!  Mr. Arnheim, I want to introduce you to Mr. Landauer, a neckwear man out of Baltimore, and Mr. Manny Sinai, also neckwear, out of New York.”

They posed, with the white sunlight in their eyes.

“I hope we won’t break the camera,” said Arnheim.

The remark was greeted with laughter.  The little machine clicked, the new-comers departed, and then Miss Sternberger and Mr. Arnheim turned to each other again.

“You ain’t tired, are you—­Myra?”

“No—­Simon”—­she danced to her feet and tossed the hair back from her face—­“I ain’t tired.”

They walked down the beach toward the bathhouse, humming softly to themselves.

“I’ll be out in ten minutes,” she said, pausing at the door of her locker.

“Me too,” he said.

When they met again they were regroomed and full of verve.  She was as cool as a rose.  They laughed at their crinkly finger-tips—­wrinkled by the water like parchment; and his neck, where it rose above the soft high collar, was branded by the sun a flaming red.

“Gee!” she cried.  “Ain’t you sunburnt!”

“I always tan red,” he said.

“And me, I always tan tan.”

They exchanged these pithy and inspired bits of autobiography in warm, intimate tones.  At their hotel steps she sighed with a delicious weariness.

“I wish I could do everything for you, little one—­even walk up-stairs.”

“I ain’t tired, Simon; only—­only—­Oh, I don’t know.”

“Little one,” he said, softly.

In the lobby Miss Bella Blondheim leaned an elbow on the clerk’s desk and talked to a stout young man with a gold-mounted elk’s tooth on his watch-fob, and black hair that curled close to his head.

They made a group of four for a moment, Miss Blondheim regarding the arrivals with bright, triumphant eyes.