followed accusations and recrimination.
"It's YOUR fault; you might have written, and had him meet us at the
settlement." "You wanted to take him by surprise!" "I didn't. You
know if I'd written that we were coming, he'd have taken good care to
run away from us." "Yes, to some more inaccessible place." "There can
be none worse than this," etc., etc. But it was so clearly evident
that nothing was to be done but to go forward, that even in the midst
of their wrangling they straggled on in Indian file toward the distant
cabin, sinking ankle-deep in the yielding sand, punctuating their
verbal altercation with sighs, and only abating it at a scream from the
elder lady.

"Where's Maria?"

"Gone on ahead!" grunted the younger gentleman, in a bass voice, so
incongruously large for him that it seemed to have been a
ventriloquistic contribution by somebody else.

It was too true. Maria, after adding her pungency to the general
conversation, had darted on ahead. But alas! that swift Camilla, after
scouring the plain some two hundred feet with her demitrain, came to
grief on an unbending tussock and sat down, panting but savage. As
they plodded wearily toward her, she bit her red lips, smacked them on
her cruel little white teeth like a festive and sprightly ghoul, and
lisped:--

"You DO look so like guys! For all the world like those English
shopkeepers we met on the Righi, doing the three-guinea excursion in
their Sunday clothes!"

Certainly the spectacle of these exotically plumed bipeds, whose fine
feathers were already bedrabbled by sand and growing limp in the sea
breeze, was somewhat dissonant with the rudeness of sea and sky and
shore. A few gulls screamed at them; a loon, startled from the lagoon,
arose shrieking and protesting, with painfully extended legs, in
obvious burlesque of the younger gentleman. The elder lady felt the
justice of her gentle daughter's criticism, and retaliated with simple
directness:--

"Your skirt is ruined, your hair is coming down, your hat is half off
your head, and your shoes--in Heaven's name, Maria! what HAVE you done
with your shoes?"

Maria had exhibited a slim stockinged foot from under her skirt. It was
scarcely three fingers broad, with an arch as patrician as her nose.
"Somewhere between here and the carriage," she answered; "Dick can run
back and find it, while he is looking for your brooch, mamma. Dick's
so obliging."

The robust voice of Dick thundered, bu