“She’s taking it back to some one,” said Kent.

“Poor thing,” said Lydia.

“Poor thing!” sniffed Kent.  “It would be a good thing if they were all dead.  My father says so.”

“Well, I guess your father don’t know everything,” snapped Lydia.

“Evyfing,” said Patience, who had finished her lunch and was digging in the sand.

Kent paused in the beginning of his attack on his last sandwich to look Lydia over.  She was as thin as a half-grown chicken in her wet bathing suit.  Her damp curls, clinging to her head and her eyes a little heavy with heat and weariness after her morning of play, made her look scarcely older than Patience.  Kent wouldn’t confess, even to himself, how fond he was of Lydia.

“Here,” he said gruffly.  “I can’t eat this sandwich.  Mother made me too many.  And here’s a doughnut.”

“Thanks, Kent,” said Lydia meekly.  “What do you want to play, after lunch?”

“Robinson Crusoe,” replied Kent promptly.  “You’ll have to be Friday.”

As recipient of his bounty, Lydia recognized Kent’s advantage and conceded the point without protest.

She held Patience’s abbreviated bathing suit skirt with one hand.  “Where are you heading for, baby?” she asked.

“Mardy!  Mardy!” screamed Patience, tugging at her leash.

“Oh, rats, it’s Margery Marshall.  Look at the duds on her.  She makes me sick,” groaned Kent.

“She’s crazy about little Patience,” answered Lydia, “so I put up with a lot from her.”

She loosed her hold on Patience.  The baby trundled along the sand to meet the little girl in an immaculate white sailor suit, who approached pushing a doll buggy large enough to hold Patience.  She ran to meet the baby and kissed her, then allowed her to help push the doll carriage.

“Mardy tum!  Mardy tum!” chanted Patience.

Margery’s black hair was in a long braid, tied with a wide white ribbon.  Margery’s hands were clean and so were her white stockings and shoes.  She brought the doll’s carriage to pause before Lydia and Kent and gazed at them appraisingly out of bright black eyes—­beautiful eyes, large and heavily lashed.  Kent’s face was dirty and sweat streaked.  His red bathing suit was gray with sand and green with grass stain.  On his head he wore his favorite headgear, a disreputable white cotton cap with the words “Goldenrod Flour Mills” across the front.

“Well,” he said belligerently, to Margery, “do you see anything green?”

Margery shrugged her shoulders.  “Watcha playing?”

“Nothing!  Want to play it?” replied Lydia.

“Thanks,” answered Margery.  “I’ll watch you two while I sit with the baby.  Isn’t she just ducky in that bathing suit?”

Lydia melted visibly and showed a flash of white teeth.  “You bet!  How’s Gwendolyn?” nodding toward the great bisque doll seated in the wonderful doll carriage.  “I wish I had a doll like that.”