Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/267

Rh “drawing.” This, at least, was the term that Brenda applied to his manner of drawing out the old fishermen.

Julia begged to be taken out to Eastern Point to get a glimpse of an Old Maid’s Paradise. Mr. Weston read statistics from a guide-book, and Julia quoted poetry, and  they yielded so far to Brenda’s wishes, as to take her down  to a hotel, where she could sit on the piazza, and see a  crowd of young people wandering back and forward to  the beach, to the rocks toward the Golf Links, and where  at last they had dinner in the vast dining-room into which  the strains of a small orchestra wandered, in a rather  hopeless competition with the clatter of dishes, and knives and forks.

They had almost a week of this pleasant wandering about, and Mr. Weston used his sketching-block almost  as extravagantly as Brenda used her camera, and Julia  wrote long pages in a note-book, which she intended to  copy into her diary on her return home. Then in the evening, when Agnes and Ralph Weston sat apart at one  end of the piazza, “looking at the stars,” as Brenda said,  Julia and Brenda talked over the doings of the day with  Mr. and Mrs. Barlow. They had only a week for these pleasant jaunts, for at the end of that time Mr. Weston  was to return to New York for a fortnight, while Brenda  and Julia were to go off on little visits. During their absence, Agnes was to entertain several of her school  friends. Her absence had cut her off from many of them, and now her marriage was to take her away for a still  longer time. The absence of Julia and Brenda would