Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/220

204 be glad to know more about the man, and that if she learned his name, he would look him up and do something for him.

But the fact remained, as Nora had reminded Brenda, that the man had not given his name to the girls, and his  address was so vaguely stated, that there was very little  chance of their finding him. But on this bright afternoon, as the friends sat by the sea, Brenda, who never looked  wholly on the dark side of things, decided that there was  every chance that the man would call at her house. “He certainly had my name and address, and he seemed very  anxious to have one of the photographs.”

“They are very good,” said Julia, “and I am surprised that your camera could make such a good portrait as that  of the man and his child. Any one who knew them would recognize them in  a minute, and that’s more than can be  said of most amateur portraits. Not yours, of course, Brenda,” she concluded, for she knew that her cousin was  a little sensitive on the subject of her work in photography.

The reading class was progressing, for the girls had really followed the chance suggestion made that day at Marblehead, and had begun a course of regular reading. They met regularly twice a week, and in fact there had been  hardly a day since their pilgrimage on which they had not  been able to find an hour or two which could be given to  reading, either on Brenda’s piazza, or in the shadow of the  rocks. Their first book had been “Mosses from an Old Manse,” which, strangely enough, not one of them had read  before. After this had come Theodore Winthrop’s “John