"I don't know,"she answered,her upper lip trembling as though she were going to cry."I want to go home with Mother.""You can't go home,"he said firmly,"and you can't see your mother,because she's asleep.""I've made my shoes dirty,"she said,looking down at her feet,"and I'm so tired of holding my sunshade.""I should shut it up,"Jeremy said without any hesitation."I think it's a silly thing.I'm glad I'm not a girl.Do you have to take it with you everywhere?""Not if it's raining.Then I have an umbrella.""I think you'd better come and see the crabs,"he settled."They're only just over there."She moved along with him reluctantly,looking back continually to where her mother ought to be.
"Are you enjoying yourself?"Jeremy asked politely.
"No,"she said,without any hesitation,"I want to go home.""She's as selfish as anything,"he thought to himself."We're giving the party,and she ought to have said 'Yes'even if she wasn't.""Do you like my dog?"he asked,with another effort at light conversation.
"No,"she answered,with a little shiver."He's ugly.""He isn't ugly,"Jeremy returned indignantly."He isn't perhaps the very best breed,but Uncle Samuel says that that doesn't matter if he's clever.He's better than any other dog.I love him more than anybody.He isn't ugly!""He is,"cried Charlotte with a kind of wail."Oh!I want to go home.""Well,you can't go home,"he answered her fiercely."So you needn't think about it."They came to the little pools,three of them,now clear as crystal,blue on their surface,with green depths and red shelving rock.
"Now you sit there,"he said cheerfully."No one will touch you.The crabs won't get at you."He looked about him and noticed with surprise where he was.He was sitting on the farther corner of the very beach where the Scarlet Admiral had landed with his men.It was out there beyond that bend of rock that the wonderful ship had rode,with its gold and silk,its jewelled masts and its glittering board.Directly opposite to him was the little green path that led up the hill,and above it the very field--Farmer Ede's field!
For a long,long time they sat there in silence.He forgot Charlotte in his interest over his discovery,staring about him and watching how quickly the August afternoon was losing its heat and colour,so that already a little cold autumnal wind was playing about the sand,the colours were being drawn from the sky,and a grey web was slowly pulled across the sea.
"Now,"he said cheerfully at last,to Charlotte,"I'll look for the crabs.""I hate crabs,"she said."I want to go home.""You can't go home,"he answered furiously."What's the good of saying that over and over again?You aren't going yet,so it's no use saying you are.""You're a horrid little boy,"she brought out with a kind of inanimate sob.
He did not reply to that;he was still trying to behave like a gentleman.How could he ever have liked her?Why,her hair was not so much after all.What was hair when you come to think of it?Mary got on quite well with hers,ugly though it was.She was stupid,stupid,stupid!She was like someone dead.As he searched for the crabs that weren't there he felt his temper growing.Soon he would lead her back to her mother and leave her there and never see her again.
But this was not the climax of the afternoon.