Coot Club. Arthur Ransome

Mrs. Barrable has a plan to suggest.”

      “How do you do?” said Tom, dusting the sawdust off before shaking hands.

      “And these,” said Mrs. Dudgeon, “are Nell and Bess.”

      “Port and Starboard,” said Mrs. Barrable. “We saw you racing yesterday and we all hoped you would win.”

      “It wasn’t daddy’s fault we didn’t,” said Starboard. “If the river’d been a wee bit wider nothing could have saved them.”

      At that moment there was a determined and rather indignant yelp from “our baby” somewhere upstairs in the house.

      “Is he all right?” said Tom.

      “Perhaps you’d like to talk it over with them,” said Mrs. Dudgeon.

      “You run away, my dear,” said Mrs. Barrable, just as if Mrs. Dudgeon was herself only a little girl.

      Tom’s mother laughed. She did not seem to mind. She shook hands with Mrs. Barrable and was gone.

      “And is that the Titmouse?” asked Mrs. Barrable, looking along the dyke. “You do keep her smart.”

      “She wants another coat of paint, really,” said Tom. “I’ve got the paint, but I don’t want to put it on till the end of the hols. You see it won’t matter her being wet when I have to go to school.”

      “Does she sleep two?”

      “There’s room for two,” said Tom. “One each side of the centre-board. But I’ve only had her fitted for sleeping these last two nights. She isn’t really finished yet.” He turned back the awning to let Mrs. Barrable see inside. “Those lockers are all going to have doors.”

      And then suddenly Mrs. Barrable turned to the business that had brought her to the doctor’s house. She told them how her brother had been coming to the Broads for some years and how this year he had chartered the Teasel, meaning to take his sister for a cruise right through Yarmouth and up to Beccles, where they had been children together, and round to Oulton and up the Norwich river.^* She told them how, after a week on the Bure and at Hickling, he had suddenly had to go off, and how she had invited Dick and Dorothea to come and keep her company in the Teasel. “But what I didn’t know,” she said, “was that the two of them had set their hearts on learning to sail ever since they made friends with some nautical children in the winter holidays. And, of course, they’re dreadfully disappointed…. No, no. They don’t say so. If they did I shouldn’t feel so bad about it. I’m rather disappointed, too. I’d been looking forward to seeing Breydon again, and sailing in to Waveney and the Yare…. Now, how would the three of you care to come and sail the Teasel for us? I know Tom knows how to sink a boat.”

      “Sail her?” said Tom.

      “Take her down to the southern rivers and back,” said Mrs. Barrable. “Just to let those two children feel they’d seen something of the Broads. And you’d have to teach them a little first, so that they wouldn’t feel they were only passengers.”

      Tom looked down at the Titmouse, at the new awning, and the lockers. Black treachery it would be, to leave her for the Teasel.

      “I’ve thought it all out,” said Mrs. Barrable. “You’d have to bring the Titmouse or we shouldn’t have enough sleeping room at night. If you could do with Dick in the Titmouse, we four will have the Teasel to ourselves … two cabins, one for the twins, and Dorothea will share the other with me. Two or three days’ practice first in the easy waters up here, I thought, and then away for a cruise so as to be back in time to send them home before the end of the holidays.”

      “The Teasel’s a splendid boat,” said Tom.

      For one moment the twins’ eyes lit like his at the thought of such a voyage in charge, in actual command, of such a vessel. Then they remembered.

      “We’d simply love to,” said Starboard, “but we can’t … really can’t. You see there’s a race tomorrow, and then another one, and father’s entered Flash