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
would think you were all nineteen. _I_ was the only comfy one."

Rosalind was always talking about age, emphasizing it, as if it were very
important.

They hurried up to the tents, and last of all came Nan, riding in to
shore on a swelling wave and lying full length where it flung her, for
the joy of feeling the wet sand sucking away beneath her.

5

Grandmama, waiting for them on the esplanade, was angry with Mrs. Hilary.

"My dear child, didn't you hear me call? You're perfectly blue. You
_know_ you never stay in more than five minutes. Neville, you should have
seen that she didn't. Now you'll get your rheumatism back, child, and
only yourself to thank. It's too silly. People of sixty-three carrying
on as if they were fifty; I've no patience with it."

"They all swam out," said Mrs. Hilary, who, once having succumbed to the
impulse to adopt this attitude, could not check it. "I waited for them."

Grandmama, who was cross, said "Very silly of you and very selfish of the
children. Now you'd better go to bed with hot bottles and a posset."

But Mrs. Hilary, though she felt the red-hot stabbings of an attack of
rheumatism already beginning, stayed up. She was happier now, because the
children were making a fuss of her, suggesting remedies and so on. She
would stay up, and show them she could be plucky and cheerful even with
rheumatism. A definite thing, like illness or pain, always put her on her
mettle; it was so easy to be brave when people knew you had something to
be brave about, and so hard when they didn't.

They had an early tea, and then Gilbert and Rosalind, who were going out
to dinner, caught the 5.15 back to town. Rosalind's departure made Mrs.