"I suppose you'll know what they'll say about you?" I tried another tack.
"I know what they'll think," she told me, with her inimitable calm.
"If you have the nerve, it's no business of mine," I conceded.
"Felicia'll be so busy scolding me that she'll forget all about you," she suggested, naïvely.
"There's something in that," I was manly enough to confess.
The boat now lay-to in the shallow water. Phillips hailed us.
"You'll have to put your hair up," I told her. "They've got no dinghy. We'll have to swim for it."
"And wet myself all over again? No, indeed; you'll have to carry me," she calmly announced. "They can come inshore as far as that."
"You'll have to square me with Felicia," I muttered.
Laughingly Lydia Massingbyrd made a rope of her hair, to keep it safe from the water, that she might the better blind the poor wretches in the boat with its radiance. So carry her I did. As we were well out in the water I heard the snap of Almington's camera.
"Won't Felicia be in a wax?" the incorrigible woman giggled in my ear.
"It's lucky for you it's me," I said to her, critically. "Even as it is, it's most imprudent!"
She looked at me, an impudent gleam in her eye.
"I'm mighty careful in choosing my company when I'm cast away on a desert island," said she.
"I don't understand women at all," I rather rashly confessed to Felicia.
"That's all the better for us--I mean for me," she threw back at me.
"But I do understand you're all a matchmaking lot," I continued, severely.
"Oh, we're a matchmaking lot, are we?" Felicia's tone was one of flattering interest. She was arranging a bit of vine that had somehow gotten torn down. She now turned toward me, the picture of innocent surprise.
"You like matchmaking for the fun of the thing--just as a man likes shooting," I went on. "You'd marry any person to any other person, regardless of age, position or----"
"Suitability," I amended; "just for the sake of having a wedding."
"You're talking now in the manner and tone of a husband," Felicia accusingly told me. "Anyone who heard your voice afar off would know you were one." I paid no attention to Felicia's interruption.
"If I'm not right, kindly tell me if Lydia Massingbyrd wasn't matchmaking when she got you to ask Almington and little Cecilia Bennett down here; and if you weren't matchmaking when you consented to ask them."