“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 sandcastle.”

“I don’t care. He’s a perfect stranger.”

It seemed to me that, if the modern girl goes about building sandcastles 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.

I said as much to Freddie, but he wasn’t listening.