Freddie, dear old chap, was rather slow at getting on to the fine points of the idea. When I appeared, carrying the kid, and dumped him down in our sitting-room, he didn’t absolutely effervesce with joy, if you know what I mean. The kid had started to bellow by this time, and poor old Freddie seemed to find it rather trying.
“Stop it!” he said. “Do you think nobody’s got any troubles except you? What the deuce is all this, Reggie?”
The kid came back at him with a yell that made the window rattle. I raced to the kitchen and fetched a jar of honey. It was the right stuff. The kid stopped bellowing and began to smear his face with the stuff.
“Well?” said Freddie, when silence had set in. I explained the idea. After a while it began to strike him.
“You’re not such a fool as you look, sometimes, Reggie,” he said handsomely. “I’m bound to say this seems pretty good.”
And he disentangled the kid from the honey-jar and took him out, to scour the beach for Angela.
I don’t know when I’ve felt so happy. I was so fond of dear old Freddie that to know that he was soon going to be his old bright self again made me feel as if somebody had left me about a million pounds. I was leaning back in a chair on the veranda, smoking peacefully, when down the road I saw the old boy returning, and, by George, the kid was still with him. And Freddie looked as if he hadn’t a friend in the world.
“Hello!” I said. “Couldn’t you find her?”
“Yes, I found her,” he replied, with one of those bitter, hollow laughs.
“Well, then——?”