earth. And she, who was sixty-three, possessed nothing. She could not
even swim with her children. They might have thought of that, and stayed
with her.... Neville, anyhow. Jim would have, said Mrs. Hilary to
herself, half knowing and half not knowing that she was lying.

"_Come out, dear!_" called Grandmama from the esplanade. "_You'll be
ill!_"

Back they came, Neville first. Neville, seeing from afar her mother's
blue face, called "Mother dear, how cold you are! You shouldn't have
stayed in so long!"

"I was waiting," Mrs. Hilary said, "for you."

"Oh why, dear?"

"Don't know. I thought I would.... It's pretty poor fun," Mrs. Hilary
added, having failed after trying not to, "bathing all alone on one's
birthday."

Neville gave a little sigh, and gently propelled her mother to the shore.
She hadn't felt like this on _her_ birthday, when Kay and Gerda had gone
off to some avocation of their own and left her in the garden. Many
things she had felt on her birthday, but not this. It is an undoubted
truth that people react quite differently to birthdays.

Rosalind rose out of the foam like Aphrodite, grandly beautiful, though
all the paint was washed off her face and lips.

"Wonderful people," she apostrophised the shore-coming family. "Anyone