THE IMP AND THE ANGEL
EVERY morning after breakfast, when the Imp trotted down the steps of the broad hotel piazza, with his brown legs bare, and his big iron shovel—none of your ten-cent tin scoops for him!—he was filled anew with pity for Algernon Marmaduke Schuyler. This young man sat gloomily by his nurse—fancy a boy of eight with a nurse!—and pretended to amuse himself by staring at the beachful of bathers and the gentlemen diving from the float. He wore a white duck sailor-suit with blue trimmings, and he was never seen without his rubbers. Once a day, in the middle of the afternoon, he was taken down to the water in a little blue bath-robe, and guarded carefully from the shore while he played, for ten minutes by the watch, in the shallow water.
To-day the sun was under a cool gray cloud, and Mrs. Schuyler had forbidden him to leave the piazza.
"Stay with Emma, my angel, and play quietly,"
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