Surreptitious

Today’s word is surreptitious which is an adjective which means done, made, or gotten by stealth; or acting with or marked by stealth.

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She noticed it immediately, as she trailed Jake, her younger brother, while they were crossing the street at an intersection, heading home from school and about a block away from their home. It was a small brown bag, a paper lunch-sack type, lying crumpled on the edge of a mud puddle. She wondered if there was something inside, hoping with unrealistic childhood optimism that it contained a bundle of money; money that she and Jake could use to buy the camping gear she had carefully selected from the Sears and Roebuck mail order catalog. She had painstakingly listed out all of the equipment and the price for each item that they would need to go on great camping adventures in the woods. The total cost to purchase all of the supplies on her list was considerable, but not insurmountable, she informed Jake, but she had yet to devise a plan for saving up that much money; their weekly allowance was never consistent, and the lemonade stand they had operated last week had resulted in a net loss, since they had spent more on supplies, the Kool-Aid Lemonade mix and the sugar, than they had sold. So she was very excited when the bag seem to contain something substantial, as she kicked it away from the water’s edge, and quickly, without looking inside, she surreptitiously bent over and scooped it up, shoving it in her coat pocket before Jake could turn around.

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