His mother and Miss Charity stayed on the wharf, continuing to wave their handkerchiefs until the sloop was so far out that she looked like a toy ship on the smooth, blue water. But Erica slipped away from them as soon as she was sure Lis could not see them any longer, and walked very fast up the beach to a point where she would be out of sight of houses and people, and there she sat herself disconsolately down on the warm, yellow sand, and told herself she _wasn’t_ going to cry, not for anything in the world—and promptly contradicted her brave assertion by doing it. However, being Erica, the tears didn’t last long, and at the end of the little fit of crying she sat up and wiped them away briskly, feeling better for the outburst, yet rather ashamed of herself, too. “Now I’ll go back to Tommy,” she said aloud, addressing an inquisitive tern which had hovered a second or two overhead, on quickly-beating slim white wings, cocking its bright eyes down at this strange human in a brown plaid dress who sat huddled on the sand, and made funny, choking sounds that, even to a tern’s ears seemed to hold a note of distress. “Tommy’ll be feeling pretty bad, too,” Erica continued to address the tern, and then, as it darted away with a farewell flirt of its wings, she added with a little burst of admiration: “Oh, you beautiful, beautiful thing! If I can’t be a boy and go to sea, the next choice would be a tern or a great gray gull, so I could swoop about over the water all day long, fishing and enjoying myself, just as you do.” She walked home slowly, close to the water’s edge, where the sand was wet and firm. There was usually a surf on the island’s south shore, but here on the north beach there were scarcely ever more than ripples coming in, and on that day the clear green water beat in softly against the dark sand like the pattering of fairy hand-clapping. Looking down into it, Erica could make out scores of small hermit crabs moving clumsily about in search of their midday dinners, dragging their big shell houses on their backs; and the more agile spider crabs crawling along the bottom among them, likewise intent on the serious question of food. Erica loved all the quaint little sea creatures she had come to know on her beach walks, as well as the terns and the big gray herring gulls which arrived about this time each year, after the smaller, laughing-gulls of the summer had migrated farther south. The autumn was a wonderful season for seeing strange birds, that stopped a day or two on Nantucket to break their long, migratory flights to warmer climes.