and she snubbed Breckon from his supposed charge of the party. But after
the start, when she declared that Ellen could not go, and that it was
ridiculous for her to think of it, she was very good to her, and looked
after her safety and comfort with a despotic devotion.

At the Kurhaus she promptly took the lead in choosing rooms, for she had
no doubt of staying there after the first glance at the place, and
she showed a practical sense in settling her family which at least her
mother appreciated when they were installed the next day.

Mrs. Kenton could not make her husband admire Lottie's faculty so
readily. "You think it would have been better for her to sit down with
Ellen, on the sand and dream of the sea," she reproached him, with a
tender resentment on behalf of Lottie. "Everybody can't dream."

"Yes, but I wish she didn't keep awake with such a din," said the judge.
After all, he admired Lottie's judgment about the rooms, and he censured
her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair
fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already
made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.

"What is the matter?" said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. "Do you want to be
in Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard's
back-yard."

"No," said the judge, mildly, "this is very nice."

"It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don't care how much she sits on
the sands and dream. I'll love to see her."

The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton's preoccupations
of the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in
one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole
vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her
in cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her
father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude
of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and,
with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen
girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure,
wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting
in their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they
had pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The
windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go
away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little g