“If you’re deliberately turning that child loose into a boarding-house full, presumably, of quiet, inoffensive people, you deserve all you get.  It’s nothing to do with me.  I’m going to have a rest cure.  I’ve disowned him.  He can do as he likes.”

“It can’t be helped, dear,” said Mrs. Brown mildly.

Mr. Brown had engaged one of the huts on the beach chiefly for William’s use, and William proudly furnished its floor with the buckskin.

“It was killed by my uncle,” he announced to the small crowd of children at the door who had watched with interest his painstaking measuring of the floor in order to place his treasure in the exact centre.  “He killed it dead—­jus’ like this.”

William had never heard the story of the death of the buck, and therefore had invented one in which he had gradually come to confuse himself with his uncle in the role of hero.

“It was walkin’ about an’ I—­he—­met it.  I hadn’t got no gun, and it sprung at me an’ I caught hold of its neck with one hand an’ I broke off its horns with the other, an’ I knocked it over.  An’ it got up an’ ran at me—­him—­again, an’ I jus’ tripped it up with my foot an’ it fell over again, an’ then I jus’ give it one big hit with my fist right on its head, an’ it killed it an’ it died!”

There was an incredulous gasp.

Then there came a clear, high voice from behind the crowd.

“Little boy, you are not telling the truth.”

William looked up into a thin, spectacled face.

“I wasn’t tellin’ it to you,” he remarked, wholly unabashed.

A little girl with dark curls took up the cudgels quite needlessly in William’s defence.

“He’s a very brave boy to do all that,” she said indignantly.  “So don’t you go saying things to him.”

“Well,” said William, flattered but modest, “I didn’t say I did it, did I?  I said my uncle—­well, partly my uncle.”

Mr. Percival Jones looked down at him in righteous wrath.

“You’re a very wicked little boy.  I’ll tell your father—­er—­I’ll tell your sister.”

For Ethel was approaching in the distance and Mr. Percival Jones was in no way loth to converse with her.

[Illustration:  “YOU’RE A VERY WICKED LITTLE BOY!” SAID MR. PERCIVAL JONES.]

Mr. Percival Jones was a thin, pale, aesthetic would-be poet who lived and thrived on the admiration of the elderly ladies of his boarding-house, and had done so for the past ten years.  Once he had published a volume of poems at his own expense.  He lived at the same boarding-house as the Browns, and had seen Ethel in the distance to meals.  He had admired the red lights in her dark hair and the blue of her eyes, and had even gone so far as to wonder whether she possessed the solid and enduring qualities which he would require of one whom in his mind he referred to as his “future spouse.”

He began to walk down the beach with her.