“I squeaked.
“'I choose to believe that your behaviour in this matter was a slip. I believe the episode will be a lesson to you. That is all. Go.' I goed.”
II.
George, when he had read thus far, was broadly grinning. Obviously Mrs. Chater was not such a bad sort after all. If—as no doubt—she implicitly believed her son's version of the incident, then her attitude towards Mary was, on the whole, not so bad.
But his Mary, when she had written thus far, laid down her pen, put her pretty head upon the paper and wept.
“Oh, my dear!” she choked. “There, that will make you think it was all right. You shall never know—never—what really happened. Oh, Georgie, Georgie, come very quick and take me away! How can I go on living with these beasts? Oh, Georgie, be quick, be quick!”
Then this silly Mary with handkerchief, with india-rubber, and with pen-knife erased a stain of grief that had fallen upon her pretty story; sniffed back her tears; lifted again her pen.
Now she wrote in an eager scrawl; nib flying. Had her George not been so very ordinary a young man he must have perceived the difference between that first portion so neatly penned—parti-coloured words showing where the ink had dried while the poor little brain puzzled and planned at every syllable—and this where emotion sped the thoughts.
III.
“So that's all right” (she wrote), “and now we've only got to wait, a few, few weeks. Dearest, will they fly or will they drag? What does love do to time, I wonder—whip or brake?—speed or pull? Georgie mine, I feel I don't care. If the days fly I shall be riding in them—galloping to you, wind in the face; shouting them on; standing up all flushed with the swing and the rush of it; waving to the people we go thundering past and gazing along the road where soon I will see you—nearer and nearer and nearer.