Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/61

 forward with the running seas. "I guess if it's true the whole place'll go sour on us," he said. "They'll treat us like a couple o' murderers all summer." Then he added desperately, "Well, whatever they do, we got to stand it."

"I can't!" she sobbed. "I can't! I can't!"

But she knew that Platter spoke the truth. What awaited them on shore must be borne; and in this realization Claire suffered a sharper pain than any she had yet endured in the whole course of her life. For, though she did not know it and felt that she had lived much and at times suffered much, she had never, hitherto, borne anguish at all. She had endured little achings and some mortification while her teeth were being straightened; she had been through difficulties and discouragements at school; she had wept softly at the funeral of a great-uncle when a quartet sang "Lead, Kindly Light"; but, until to-day, the worst thing that had ever happened to her was a light attack of scarlatina. She had contracted it a week after she "came out," just before the Christmas holidays, and she had wailed piteously to her mother that she was "missing everything!" But though she had no suspicion that her life had been a child's bed of roses, giving her no opportunity to learn anything