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 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.
“Well, who is this ghastly child, then?” I said.
“I don’t know. O Lord, I’ve had a time! Thank goodness you will probably spend the next few years of your life in Dartmoor for kidnapping. That’s my only consolation. I’ll come and jeer at you through the bars on visiting days.”
“Tell me all, old man,” I said.
He told me all. It took him a good long time to do it, for he broke off in the middle of nearly every sentence to call me names, but I gradually gathered what had happened. The girl Elizabeth had listened like an