While Jane and Mabel sat in the sun leaning comfortably against the friendly dune, a group of people came towards their retreat from the crowded bathing beach.

“Goodness, I wish they would stay away from here,” grumbled Mabel. “I’m still panting for breath and I certainly don’t want to move.”

“I reckon they won’t bother us if we don’t bother them,” suggested Jane. “It looks like a swell bunch.”

“That’s what I’ve got against them. How can a body eat before such elegance and Charlie and Breck will be back soon with food, I am thinking. That’s a pretty girl in the Vanity Fair bathing suit and scarlet cap—and look at the old gent in yachting togs! He must be postmaster general of all the railroads or something grand. He looks as though he owned the island and was thinking about annexing the ocean.”

“He doesn’t seem to take much pleasure in his possessions,” laughed Jane. “He looks sad to me.”

The gentleman in question was a powerfully built man of about sixty, with iron gray hair, piercing blue eyes, a high Roman nose that seemed to flaunt its aristocratic lines and a mouth and jaw of such force and determination that Jane wondered at the impertinence of a wave that, having leaped on the back of one of its brothers, came tumbling in all out of order, wetting the immaculate white shoes of the nabob. He looked indignant but evidently felt it to be beneath his notice.

Behind him trooped a crowd of young people, five girls and two young men. The old gentleman was the only one not in bathing costume.

“This is a good place to go in, Father,” said the pretty girl in the Vanity Fair suit. “I simply could not have gone in with that common crowd up there.”

“Humph!” whispered Mabel, “that must be the princess.”

“Of course not! Such persons!” spoke up one of the other girls.

“No one knows them,” from another.

“Well, hardly!” drawled one of the young men who seemed to be dancing attendance on the pretty girl Mabel had designated as “the princess.”

“I hope they can swim and know something about undertow and getting ‘boiled’,” murmured Jane.

“The snobs! It might do them good to get a good drubbing on their stuck-up persons,” answered Mabel, looking at the interlopers with round wondering eyes.

The interlopers in turn paid not the least attention to either Jane or Mabel. If they had been sand fleas or skates’ eggs, their presence could not have been more completely ignored.

“Sorry you won’t go in, sir,” said one of the young men to the older man.

“I never learned to swim,” he answered with a certain haughty indifference of tone which put the polite young man along with the impertinent wave, the sand fleas, the skates’ eggs, Jane and Mabel, among the things to be ignored.

“Strange! Your daughter is a beautiful swimmer—”

“Yes, beautiful!” chorused the girls who seemed to be bent on flattering the pretty daughter.

“She does everything well,” said one of them.

“And your son is—” but what his son was Jane and Mabel could not hear, as the gentleman turned on his heel and walked off up the beach puffing vigorously at a long black cigar that Mabel insisted smelt as though it might have cost a dollar.

“Lorna, darling, I hate for you to get your pretty bathing suit wet,” said one of the girls, whose manner was even more fawning than the rest.

“Oh, Lord!” groaned Mabel. “Just listen!”

“Lorna! Lorna!” Jane said to herself. “Could these be Breck’s people?” Looking after the retreating figure of the impatient old gentleman, she saw unmistakable lines of resemblance. He could be none other than the father of the man she had promised to marry.

“Poor Breck! They are certainly difficult,” she said to herself. “But the father looks sad. I believe he has been suffering, and the girl is sweet looking and mighty pretty. It is just this lot of flatterers and sillies that are ruining her. Look at the men! They haven’t a chin between them and the girls ought to have a good strenuous course in Camp Fire training to knock the foolishness out of them.”

She said nothing to Mabel about the possibility of their being the Breckenridges. Mabel was not a marvel of tact and Jane felt that here was a situation that must be handled delicately. She hoped something would detain Breck and she could warn him that his father and sister were on the beach. It might be hard on him to come upon them unawares. She felt assured, however, that her Breck was equal to any emergency.

“I wish I could get my wind back,” said Mabel. “That ‘boiling’ has done me up for the day. I wanted to go in the water again but I fancy I’d better not.”

“You are panting, you poor dear,” said Jane sympathetically.

“I was scared about Charlie. I believe that did me up more than all of the fancy somersaults I turned.”

“Why don’t you cuddle down and take a nap?” suggested Jane.

“I believe I will,” Mabel curled herself up in the sand and in a moment was fast asleep.

Jane, glad to have quiet for her thoughts, directed her attention to the bathers. The pretty Lorna had dived through the breakers and was riding the waves like a veritable mermaid. She was a good swimmer and seemed perfectly at home in the surf.

“Isn’t she w............