Every one on the ledge recognised the tableau when it appeared, and saluted it with cheers and hand-clapping.  Mrs. Pasmer bent a look on her daughter which she faced impenetrably.

“Where have you been?” “We thought you were lost!” “We were just organising a search expedition!” different ones shouted at them.

The lady with the coffee-pot was kneeling over it with her hand on it.  “Have some coffee, you poor things!  You must be almost starved.”

“We looked about for you everywhere,” said Munt, “and shouted ourselves dumb.”

Miss Anderson passed near Alice.  “I knew where you were all the time!”

Then the whole party fell to praising the novel conception of the bouquets of blueberries, and the talk began to flow away from Alice and Mavering in various channels.

All that had happened a few minutes ago in the blueberry patch seemed a far-off dream; the reality had died out of the looks and words.

He ran about from one to another, serving every one; in a little while the whole affair was in his hospitable hands, and his laugh interspersed and brightened the talk.

She got a little back of the others, and sat looking wistfully out over the bay, with her hands in her lap.

“Hold on just half a minute, Miss Pasmer! don’t move!” exclaimed the amateur photographer, who is now of all excursions; he jumped to his feet, and ran for his apparatus.  She sat still, to please him; but when he had developed his picture, in a dark corner of the rocks, roofed with a waterproof, he accused her of having changed her position.  “But it’s going to be splendid,” he said, with another look at it.

He took several pictures of the whole party, for which they fell into various attitudes of consciousness.  Then he shouted to a boat-load of sailors who had beached their craft while they gathered some drift for their galley fire.  They had flung their arm-loads into the boat, and had bent themselves to shove it into the water.

“Keep still! don’t move!” he yelled at them, with the imperiousness of the amateur photographer, and they obeyed with the helplessness of his victims.  But they looked round.

“Oh, idiots!” groaned the artist.

“I always wonder what that kind of people think of us kind of people,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with her eye on the photographer’s subjects.

“Yes, I wonder what they do?” said Miss Cotton, pleased with the speculative turn which the talk might take from this.  “I suppose they envy us?” she suggested.

“Well, not all of them; and those that do, not respectfully.  They view, us as the possessors of ill-gotten gains, who would be in a very different place if we had our deserts.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know that I really think so.  That’s another matter,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with the whimsical resentment which Miss Cotton’s conscientious pursuit seemed always to rouse in her.