Her father released Susie and stared at his other daughter in amazement.
"What on earth for?" he demanded.
"Oh, everybody seems to be over there—you've noticed—"
"Yes, I've noticed that it's running over with the rag-tag and bob-tail of all Europe! If you think I'll butt into that Bedlam, my dear child, you're badly mistaken. I'd rather live with the freaks in a museum."
"But it's so quiet here."
"I'm glad of it! Besides, I thought you wanted quiet?"
"Only for your sake—don't you see, we're trying our best to please you.
A moment ago, you said you wanted excitement."
"I do; but it must be excitement with an object. I haven't got any use for the infernal, purposeless chattering I hear all around me every time I go out on the dyke. Damn a man, anyhow, who can't find anything better to do than to run around to summer-resorts and flirt with other men's wives! I tell you, girls, I want to get back to New York!"
"Give us another month, dad!" pleaded Sue, catching his arm again, as he stamped up and down. "You know that you promised to stay with us two months, at the very least. We can't go around without a chaperon."
Her father's face relaxed as he looked down at her, and he smiled grimly.
"So we get down to the real reason, at last, do we?" he queried. "I thought all this solicitude for my health was a trifle unnatural. I'm useful as a chaperon, am I? See here, girls, I can put in my time more profitably at the stock exchange, and have a heap more fun. I'll hire a chaperon for you, or half a dozen, if you want them, and pull out for New York. What do you say? I don't know the first principles of the business, anyway."
"Oh, yes, you do, dad!" protested Susie. "You're a perfectly ideal chaperon."
"I am? The ideal chaperon, then, must be one who never does any chaperoning!"
"That's it, exactly!" cried Nell, clapping her hands delightedly. "How quickly you see things, dad!"
"So that's it!" and he stood for a moment looking darkly at his offspring. "Well, you girls are old enough to take care of yourselves. If you can't, it's high time you were learning how!"
"Oh, we're perfectly able to take care of ourselves," Sue assured him.
"You mustn't worry about us for a moment, dad."
"I'm not likely to. But, in that case, why do you want me along at all?"
"Why, don't you see, dad, it's you who give us the odour of respectability. By ourselves, we should be social outcasts, impossible, not to be spoken to—except by men. It isn't convenable."
"Oh, I see," said Rushford. "The first great principle of European society seems to be, 'Think the worst of every one.'"
"Not precisely, dad; but no unmarried woman may venture outside the circumference of the family circle. That's the great European convention—the basic principle of her social order."
"A sort of 'tag, you're it,' game, isn't it? The family circle is a kind of dead line—the ring of fire which keeps out the wild beasts. Step over, and you're lost!"
"Of course," said Nell, "it is only to unmarried women that the rule applies."
"Oh, certainly," assented her father. "Married women are allowed more latitude—in fact, from such French novels as I've read, I should infer that they usually swing clear around the circle! It's a reaction, I suppose; a sort of compensation for the privations of their youth. I don't like it. Let's go home!"
"But your promise, dad!" pleaded Sue, permitting the faintest suspicion of moisture to appear in her dark eyes. "And you know you really do need a vacation."
Her father looked down at her, saw the moisture, and surrendered.
"You're a humbug," he said; "and this vacation business is another. A man spends two or three months loafing around because somebody tells him he's looking badly and ought to take a rest; and before he knows it, he's accumulated so much rust in his system that he never gets it all out again. His machinery creaks more or less for the rest of his life. The wise man postpones his vacation to the next world."
"Well, let's call it a jaunt," suggested Susie. "A jaunt somehow implies hurry and bustle, with plenty of exercise."
"And I don't know which is the bigger fool," pursued her father, not heeding her; "the fellow who takes a vacation every year on his own hook, or the one who permits his daughters to drag him away from his comfortable home and his morning paper and the business which gives him his interest in life, and maroon him in a desert of a Dutch watering-place, where there's absolutely nothing for a self-respecting man to do but smoke himself to death and wait for a paper which never comes till day after to-morrow!"
"It sounds terribly involved, but I'll help you reason it out, dad, any time you like," said Susie, obligingly. "And you'll stay, won't you, dear?"
"Oh, I'll stay, since your heart's so set upon it. I'll try to bear up and find a diversion of some kind and not rust out any more than I can help. I might dig in the sand or make mud pies or play mumbly-peg. But I draw the line at plunging into that whirlpool across the street. My bed here is nearly as comfortable as the one at home, and the grub's first-rate."
"Very well, dad," agreed Susie, instantly seizing the concession, but speaking as though it were she who was making it, "we'll stay here, then. Only I do wish there were a few more people," she added, with a sigh. "I hate to sit down in that big, empty dining-room. I imagine I'm at an Egyptian banquet, and that there are horrid, rattly skeletons sitting in all those high, covered chairs."
"What you need is some fresh air," said her father. "You girls get your hats and go for a walk. You're growing morbid. If you think of skeletons again, I'll give you a liver pill."
"Won't you come, dad?"
"No; you know you don't want me. Besides, I see the panjandrum who brings the mail coming up the dyke down yonder."
He stood gazing down the Digue until his womenkind reappeared, bedight, ready for the walk.
"You'll do," he said, looking them over critically. "In fact, my dears, if I wasn't afraid of making you conceited, I'd say I'd never seen two handsomer girls in my life."
"Now it's you who are blarneying, dad!" cried Susie, but she dimpled with pleasure nevertheless, and so did Nell.
"No I'm not," retorted Rushford; "and I dare say there are plenty of other men, even in this Dutch limbo, who have an eye for beauty; let them break their hearts, if they have any, but keep your own hearts whole, my dears."
They were laughing in earnest, now, as they looked up in his face, which had grown suddenly serious.
"Why, dad, what ails you?" questioned Sue. "I think it is you who need the pill!"
Rushford's face cleared; they were heart-whole thus far—there could be no doubt of that.
"Perhaps I do," he agreed. "Or perhaps it's only that I'm beginning to feel the responsibilities of my position."
"Your position?"
"As chaperon," he explained.
"Dear dad!" cried Susie, and squeezed his arm. "Do you suppose that as long as we have you, either of us will ever think of another man?"
"I don't know," said her father, dubiously. "I scarcely believe I'm so fascinating as all that. But I just wanted to remind you, girls, that there's plenty of nice boys at home—boys whom you can trust, through and through—boys who are clean, and honest, and worth loving. If you must lose your hearts—and I suppose it's inevitable, some day—please do me the favour of choosing two of them. I'll sleep better at