What you might call a quiet happiness suffused me, if that's the word I want. I was very fond of old Freddie, and it was jolly to think that he was shortly about to click once more. I was leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking a peaceful cigarette, when down the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still with him.
'Hallo!' I said. 'Couldn't you find her?'
I then perceived that Freddie was looking as if he had been kicked in the stomach.
'Yes, I found her,' he replied, with one of those bitter, mirthless laughs you read about.
'Well, then—?'
He sank into a chair and groaned.
'This isn't her cousin, you idiot,' he said. 'He's no relation at all—just a kid she met on the beach. She had never seen him before in her life.'
'But she was helping him build a sand-castle.'
'I don't care. He's a perfect stranger.'
It seemed to me that, if the modern girl goes about building sand-castles with kids she has only known for five minutes and probably without a proper introduction at that, then all that has been written about her is perfectly true. Brazen is the word that seems to meet the case.