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“How you love the water, Julie!”

“Yes–best of all. I’m never so satisfied as when I’m in it!”

“You never look so happy as when you are,” he said.

“Oh, these are happy days!” said Julie. “I wish they could last forever. Just resting and playing–wouldn’t you like a year of it, Jim?”

The doctor eyed her quietly.

“I don’t know that I would,” he said seriously, impersonally.

There was a little silence. Then the girl began to pin up her braids with fingers that trembled a little.

“Ann’s waving!” she said presently, and the doctor caught up her scarlet cap to signal back to the far blur on the beach that was Ann. He watched the tiny distant groups a moment.

“Here comes your admirer!” said he.

“Where?” Julie was ready at once to slip into the water.

“Oh–finish your hair–take your time! She’s just in the breakers. We’ll be off long before she gets here.”

“That reminds me, Jim,” Miss Ives was quite herself again, “that when I was in the bath-house a few moments ago your Dancing Girl and that pretty little girl who is visiting her came into the next room. You know how flimsy the walls are? I could hear every word they said.”

“If you’d been a character in a story, Ju, you’d have felt it your duty to cough!”

“Well, I didn’t,” grinned Miss Ives; “not that I wanted to hear what they were saying. I didn’t even know who they were until I heard little Miss Carter say solemnly, ‘Ethel, I used to want mamma to get that Forty-eighth Street house, and I used to want to do Europe, but I think if I had ONE wish now, it would be to do something that would MAKE everybody know me–and everybody talk about me. I’d LOVE to be pointed out wherever I went. I’d love to have people stare at me. I’d like to be just as popular and just as famous as Julia Ives!'”

“She HAS got it badly, Ju!” the doctor observed.

“She has. And it will be fuel on the flames to have me start to swim back to shore while she is swimming as hard as she can to the raft!” said the lady, tucking the last escaping lock under her cap and springing up for the plunge that started the home trip.

It was only a little after midnight that night when Julie, lying wakeful in the sultry summer darkness, was startled by a person in her room.

“It’s Emma, Miss Ives,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid, stumbling about, “Mrs. Arbuthnot wants you.”

“She’s ill!” Julie felt rather than said the words, instantly alert and alarmed, and reaching for her wrapper and slippers.

“No, ma’am. But the doctor feels like he ought to go down to the fire, and she’s nervous–“

“The fire?”

“Yes’m,” said Emma, simply, “the windmill is afire!”

“And I sleeping through it all!” Miss Ives was still bewildered, fastening the sash of her cobwebby black Mandarin robe as she followed Emma through the passage that joined her suite to the Arbuthnots’.

“Ann, dear–Emma tells me the laundry’s on fire?” said she, entering the big room. “I had no idea of it!”

“Nor had we,” the doctor’s wife rejoined eagerly. “The first we knew was from Emma. Jim says there’s no danger. Do you think there is?”

“Certainly not, Ann!” Julie laughed. “I’ll tell you what we can do,” she added briskly. “We’ll wheel you down the hall here to the window; you can get a splendid view of the whole thing.”

The doctor approving, the ladies took up their station at a wide hall window that commanded the whole scene.

Outside the velvet blackness and silence of the night were shattered. The great mill, ugly tongues of flame bursting from the door and windows at its base, was the centre of a talking, shouting, shrill-voiced crowd that was momentarily, in the mysterious fashion of crowds, gathering size.

“Wonderful sight, isn’t it, Ann?”

“Wonderful. Does this cut off our water supply, Emma?”

“No, Mrs. Arbuthnot. They’re using the little mill for the engines now.”