None of them will ever forget that great day.
Still less is any of them likely to forget the day that followed.
As dancing only ceased when the sun was about rising, before-breakfast
bathing was declared off for that day, and they arranged to meet later
on and stroll quietly down to Dixcart Bay during the morning and all
bathe together there. Charles Svendt laughingly prepared them for an
exhibition of incompetence by stating that his swimming wasn't a patch
on his dancing, but that he could get along. Miss Penny gaily gave him
points as to her own peculiar methods of swimming, which, as we know,
demanded instant and easy touch of sand or stone at any moment of the
halting progression. He confessed to a like prejudice in favour of
something solid within reach of his sinking capacity, and they agreed
to help one another.
They called for him at the hotel about eleven o'clock, and went joking
through the sunny lanes of Petit Dixcart, crossed the brook that runs
out of Hart's-Tongue Valley, and followed it by the winding path along
the side of the cliff, among the gorse and ferns, down into the bay.
They had a right merry bathe with no grave casualties. Miss Penny,
indeed, got out of her depth twice, to the extent of quite two inches,
and shrieked for help, which Charles Svendt gallantly hastened to
render; while Graeme and Margaret swam across from head to head,
watched enviously by the paddlers in shallow waters.
They went home by the climbing path up the hillside, rested on The
Quarter-deck while Charles Svendt got his breath back, and so, by the
old Dixcart hotel, and the new one nestling among its flowers and
trees, and up the Valley, to the Vicarage.
The Vicar was basking in the shade of the trees in front of the house.
"Ah-ha--Mr. and Mrs. Graeme! Good-morning! You are none the worse for
being married? Non?" as he shook hands joyously all round, with both
hands at once.
"Not a bit," laughed Graeme. "We're all as happy as sandboys."
"Comment donc--sandboys? What is that?"
"Happy little boys who dispense with clothes and paddle all day in the
sand and water."
"Ah--you have been bathing! What energie! And you danced till--?"
"About four o'clock, I suppose. The sun was just thinking of rising as
we were thinking of retiring."
"But it is marvellous! And you are not tired?"
"The bathe has freshened us all up," said Margaret.
Then Mrs. Vicar came out at sound of their voices, and felicitated
them, and begged them to rest a while in the shade. But they were all
hungry, and Charles Svendt laughingly asserted that he had swallowed
so much salt-water, in rescuing Miss Penny from a watery grave, that
his constitution absolutely needed a tiny tot of whisky, or the
consequences might be serious.
So they went laughingly on their way, and Charles tried his best to
get Miss Penny to go and show him the way to the Bel-Air, pleading
absolute confusion still as to the points of the compass and the lie
of the land.
He was to lunch with them at the Red House, but insisted on going home
first to straighten up and make himself presentable. So they led him
to the Avenue, and set his face straight down it, and bade him follow
his nose and turn neither to the right hand nor to the left, and then
they turned off through the fields by their own short-cut, and went
merrily home.