The Buccaneers Read Free Page B

felt that her likes and dislikes were no business of this strange girl’s. She gave a vague laugh and said loftily: “I think it’s silly.”
    Conchita laughed too—a low deliberate laugh, full of repressed and tantalizing mystery. Once more she flung the ball for her intently watching poodle; then she thrust a hand into a fold of her dress, and pulled out a crumpled packet of cigarettes. “Here—have one! Nobody’ll see us out here,” she suggested amicably.
    Nan’s heart gave an excited leap. Her own sister and the Elmsworth girls already smoked in secret, removing the traces of their indiscretion by consuming little highly perfumed pink lozenges furtively acquired from the hotel barber; but they had never offered to induct Nan into these forbidden rites, which, by awful oaths, they bound her not to reveal to their parents. It was Nan’s first cigarette, and while her fingers twitched for it she asked herself in terror: “Suppose it should make me sick right before her?”
    But Nan, in spite of her tremors, was not the girl to refuse what looked like a dare, nor even to ask if in this open field they were really safe from unwanted eyes. There was a clump of low shrubby trees at the farther end, and Conchita strolled there and mounted the fence-rail, from which her slender uncovered ankles dangled gracefully. Nan swung up beside her, took a cigarette, and bent toward the match which her companion proffered. There was an awful silence while she put the forbidden object to her lips and drew a frightened breath; the acrid taste of the tobacco struck her palate sharply, but in another moment a pleasant fragrance filled her nose and throat. She puffed again, and knew she was going to like it. Instantly her mood passed from timidity to triumph, and she wrinkled her nose critically and threw back her head, as her father did when he was tasting a new brand of cigar. “These are all right—where do you get them?” she enquired with a careless air; and then, suddenly forgetful of the experience her tone implied, she rushed on in a breathless little-girl voice: “Oh, Conchita, won’t you show me how you make those lovely rings? Jinny doesn’t really do them right, nor the Elmsworth girls either.”
    Miss Closson in turn threw back her head with a smile. She drew a deep breath and, removing the cigarette from her lips, curved them to a rosy circle through which she sent a wreath of misty smoke-rings. “That’s how,” she laughed, and pushed the packet into Nan’s hands. “You can practise at night,” she said good-humouredly, as she jumped from the rail.
    Nan wandered back to the hotel, so much elated by her success as a smoker that her dread of the governess grew fainter. On the hotel steps she was further reassured by the glimpse, through the lobby doors, of a tall broad-shouldered man in a Panama hat and light-gray suit who, his linen duster over his arm, his portmanteaux at his feet, had paused to light a big cigar and shake hands with the clerk. Nan gave a start of joy. She had not known that her father was arriving that afternoon, and the mere sight of him banished all her cares. Nan had a blind faith in her father’s faculty for helping people out of difficulties—a faith based not on actual experience (for Colonel St. George usually dealt with difficulties by a wave of dismissal which swept them into somebody else’s lap), but on his easy contempt for feminine fusses, and his way of saying to his youngest daughter: “You just call on me, child, when things want straightening out.” Perhaps he would straighten out even this nonsense about the governess; and meanwhile the mere thought of his large powerful presence, his big cologne-scented hands, his splendid yellow moustache and easy rolling gait, cleared the air of the cobwebs in which Mrs. St. George was always enveloped.
    â€œHullo, daughter! What’s