THE HAPPY-DAY
To escape the strangle of it, you fled to the beach with Bruno-Clarice tagging in mournful excitement at your heels, his smutty nose all a-sniff with the foreboding leathery smell of trunks and bags. There on the beach in a scoopy hollow of sand backed up against the old gray rock were Sam and Ladykin. Sam's round, fat face was fretted like a pug-dog's, and Ladykin's eyes were blinky-wet with tears.
It was not a pleasant time to say good-by. It had been a beautiful, smooth-skied day, crisp and fresh and bright-colored as a "Sunday supplement"; but now the clouds piled gray and crum pled in the west like a poor stale, thrown-away newspaper, with just a sputtering blaze in one corner like the kindling of a half-hearted match.
"Please be kind to Bruno-Clarice," you began; "I shall miss you very much—very, very much. But I will come back—"
"N—o, I do not think you will come back," said Ladykin. "You will go to Germany to live with your Father and your Play-Mother, and you will gargle all your words like a throat tonic till you don't know how to be friends in English any more; and even if you did come back Bruno-Clarice would bark at you, and I shall be married, and Sam will have a long, black beard."
Now you could have borne Ladykin's marriage;
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