Page:Daskam--The imp and the angel.djvu/21



VERY morning after breakfast, when the Imp trotted down the steps of the broad hotel piazza, with his brown legs bare, and his big iron shovel—none of your ten-cent tin scoops for him!—he was filled anew with pity for Algernon Marmaduke Schuyler. This young man sat gloomily by his nurse—fancy a boy of eight with a nurse!—and pretended to amuse himself by staring at the beachful of bathers and the gentlemen diving from the float. He wore a white duck sailor-suit with blue trimmings, and he was never seen without his rubbers. Once a day, in the middle of the afternoon, he was taken down to the water in a little blue bath-robe, and guarded carefully from the shore while he played, for ten minutes by the watch, in the shallow water.

To-day the sun was under a cool gray cloud, and Mrs. Schuyler had forbidden him to leave the piazza.

"Stay with Emma, my angel, and play quietly,"