All four thought of the spades and pails and shrimping nets, and of Eric and Elsie and the other books—and all said:
“Yes.”
“Then what was it?” Mother asked. And they could not tell her. It is sometimes awfully difficult to tell things to your mother, however much you love her. The best Francis could do was:
“Well—you see we’re not used to her.”
And Kathleen said: “I don’t think perhaps she’s used to being an aunt. But she was kind.”
And Mother was wise and didn’t ask any more questions. Also she at once abandoned an idea one had had of asking Aunt Enid to come and stay at Beachfield for part of the holidays; and this was just as well, for if Aunt Enid had not passed out of the story exactly when she did, there would not have been any story to pass out of. And as she does now pass out of the story I will say that she thought she was very kind, and that she meant extremely well.
There was a little whispering between Francis and Mavis just after tea, and a little more just before bed, but it was tactfully done and the unwhispered-to younger ones never noticed it.
The lodgings were very nice—a little way out of the town—not a villa at all as everyone had feared. I suppose the landlady thought it grander to call it a villa, but it was really a house that had once been a mill house, and was all made of a soft-colored gray wood with a red-tiled roof, and at the back was the old mill, also gray and beautiful—not used now for what it was built for—but just as a store for fishing nets and wheelbarrows and old rabbit hutches and beehives and harnesses and odds and ends, and the sack of food for the landlady’s chickens. There was a great corn bin there too—that must have been in some big stable—and some broken chairs and an old wooden cradle that hadn’t had any babies in it since the landlady’s mother was a little girl.
On any ordinary holiday the mill would have had all the charm of a magic palace for the children, with its wonderful collection of pleasant and unusual things to play with, but just now all their thoughts were on Mermaids. And the two elder ones decided that they would go out alone the first thing in the morning and look for the Mermaid.
Mavis woke Francis up very early indeed, and they got up and dressed quite quietly, not washing, I am sorry to say, because water makes such a noise when you pour it out. And I am afraid their hair was not very thoroughly brushed either. There was not a soul stirring in the road as they went out, unless you count the mill cat who had been out all night and was creeping home very tired and dusty looking, and a yellowhammer who sat on a tree a hundred yards down the road and repeated his name over and over again in that conceited way yellowhammers have, until they got close to him; and then he wagged his tail impudently at them and flew on to the next tree where he began to talk about himself as loudly as ever.
This desire to find the Mermaid must have been wonderfully strong in Francis, for it completely swallowed the longing of years—the longing to see the sea. It had been too dark the night before to see anything but the winking faces of the houses as the fly went past them. But now as he and Mavis ran noiselessly down the sandy path in their rubber shoes and turned the corner of the road, he saw a great pale-gray something spread out in front of him, lit with points of red and gold fire where the sun touched it. He stopped.
“Mavis,” he said, in quite an odd voice, “that’s the sea.”
“Yes,” she said and stopped too.
“It isn’t a bit what I expected,” he said, and went on running.
“Don’t you like it?” asked Mavis, running after him.
“Oh—like,” said Francis, “it isn’t the sort of thing you like.”
When they got down to the shore the sands and the pebbles were all wet because the tide had just gone down, and there were the rocks and the little rock pools, and the limpets, and whelks, and the little yellow periwinkles looking like particularly fine Indian corn all scattered among the red and the brown and the green seaweed.
“Now, this is jolly,” said Francis. “This is jolly if you like. I almost wish we’d wakened the others. It doesn’t seem quite fair.”
“Oh, they’ve seen it before,” Mavis said, quite truly, “and I don’t think it’s any good going by fours to look for Mermaids, do you?”
“Besides,” said Francis, saying what had been in their thoughts since yesterday in the train, “Kathleen wanted to shoot Mermaids, and Bernard thought it was seals, anyhow.”
They had sat down and were hastily pulling off their shoes and stockings.
“Of course,” said he, “we shan’t find anything. It isn’t likely.”
“Well,” she said, “for anything we jolly well know, they may have found her already. Take care how you go over these rocks, they’re awfully slippy.”
“As if I didn’t know that,” said he, and ran across the narrow strip of sand that divided rocks from shingle and set his foot for the first time in The Sea. It was only a shallow little green and white rock pool, but it was the sea all the same.
“I say, isn’t it cold,” said Mavis, withdrawing pink and dripping toes; “do mind how you go—”
“As if I—” said Francis, again, and sat down suddenly and splashingly in a large, clear sparkling pool.
“Now, I suppose we’ve got to go home at once and you change,” said Mavis, not without bitterness.
“Nonsense,” said Francis, getting up with some difficulty and clinging wetly to Mavis to steady himself. “I’m quite dry, almost.”
“You know what colds are
