Go now and give her my message." All day long Lulu had kept herself as far apart from the others--her sister excepted--as lay in her power.

She was sitting now alone in the sand, no one within several yards of her, her hands folded in her lap, while she gazed far out to sea, her eyes following a sail in the distant offing.
"Perhaps it is papa's ship," she was saying to herself.

"Oh, how long will it be before we see him again! And oh, how sorry he will be when he hears about last night and this morning!" At that instant she felt Grace's arms suddenly thrown round her, while the sweet child voice exclaimed, in an ecstasy of delight, "Oh, Lu, he _has_ come! he _has_, he _has_!" "Who ?" Lulu asked, with a start and tremble that reminded Grace of the message she had to deliver, and that Lulu's pleasure at their father's unexpected return could not be so unalloyed as her own; all which she had forgotten for the moment in the rapture of delight she herself felt at his coming.
"Papa, Lulu," she answered, sobering down, a good deal; "and I was 'most forgetting that he sent me to tell you to come to him immediately." "Did he ?" Lulu asked, trembling more than before.

"Does he know about last night, Gracie?
Did Mamma Vi tell him ?" "He knows 'bout it; somebody told him before he got to 'Sconset," said Grace.

"But mamma didn't tell him at all; he asked her, but she begged him to please not ask her.