The four drifted out of the kitchen again, disappointed. Timmy followed at their heels. “Let’s go down and have a bathe,” said Dick. “If I’m going to have six bathes a day, I’d better hurry up and have my first one.”

“I’ll get some ripe plums,” said Anne. “We can take those down with us. And I expect the ice-cream man will come along to the beach too. We shan’t starve! And we’d better wear our shirts and shorts over our bathing costumes, so we don’t catch too much sun.”

Soon they were all down on the sand. They found a good place and scraped out comfortable holes to sit in. Timmy scraped his own.

“I can’t imagine why Timmy bothers to scrape one,” said George. “Because he always squeezes into mine sooner or later. Don’t you, Timmy?”

Timmy wagged his tail, and scraped so violently that they were all covered with sand. “Pooh!” said Anne, spitting sand out of her mouth. “Stop it, Timmy. As fast as I scrape my hole, you fill it up!”

Timmy paused to give her a lick, and then scraped again, making a very deep hole indeed. He lay down in it, panting, his mouth looking as if he were smiling.

“He’s smiling again,” said Anne. “I never knew a dog that smiled like Timmy. Timmy, it’s nice to have you again.”

“Woof,” said Timmy, politely, meaning that it was nice to have Anne and the others back again, too. He wagged his tail and sent a shower of sand over Dick.

They all wriggled down comfortably into their soft warm holes. “We’ll eat the plums first and then we’ll have a bathe,” said Dick. “Chuck me one, Anne.”

Two people came slowly along the beach. Dick looked at them out of half-closed eyes. A boy and a man — and what a ragamuffin the boy looked! He wore torn dirty shorts and a filthy jersey. No shoes at all.

The man looked even worse. He slouched as he came, and dragged one foot. He had a straggly moustache and mean, clever little eyes that raked the beach up and down. The two were walking at high-water mark and were obviously looking for anything that might have been cast up by the tide. The boy already had an old box, one wet shoe and some wood under his arm.

“What a pair!” said Dick to Julian. “I hope they don’t come near us. I feel as if I can smell them from here.”

The two walked along the beach and then back. Then, to the children’s horror, they made a bee-line for where they were lying in their sandy holes, and sat down close beside them. Timmy growled.

An unpleasant, unwashed kind of smell at once came to the children’s noses. Pooh! Timmy growled again. The boy took no notice of Timmy’s growling. But the man looked uneasy.

“Come on — let’s have a bathe,” said Julian, annoyed at the way the two had sat down so close to them. After all, there was practically the whole of the beach to choose from — why come and sit almost on top of somebody else?