"I—I——" She sought to give him a true answer. "You're not old enough. I want a man, now I'm older. You won't be twenty-one for two years."
"A man!" He swung round towards her, peering with fury through the twilight into her face. "A man! What d'you call me? What do you take me for? A man!" He paused, choking for breath, then shouted out: "Go and find your man, then. I don't want you, I don't want you. I wouldn't have you at a gift. A man! Not if you went down on your hands and knees——" He was walking away as he spoke, shouting over his shoulder, almost incoherent with the rage engendered by that sudden stab in his tenderest spot. Just before he was beyond ear-shot, he paused a second and called out: "There'll be no going back. You needn't think it. I shall pay the first instalment of a new bike in the morning."
So the dusk swallowed up his slim figure, and she was left by herself on the cliff. After a while a couple came along closely entwined and when they were close on her the girl said with a start: "Carrie? Is that you all by yourself? Where's Wilf?"
"Oh, he is a bit further on," said Caroline, striving to make her voice sound casual. "Don't you stop for me."
"All right! So long as you haven't pushed him over the cliff, Carrie," said the girl, laughing: then she and her young man went their way, forgetting all about other people.
Caroline waited until they had gone some little distance before she followed them, and as she walked alone on the cliff path with the stars coming out, she had the strangest feeling of loneliness—of lacking something that had always been there since she grew up. It was rather as if she had cast some article of clothing which she had been in the habit of wearing.
On reaching the more crowded part of the cliff near the promenade her first instinct was to keep out of sight; for she had no young man with her, and vaguely felt that she would look odd without one at this time of night. It seemed so "queer" to be walking by herself on the cliff in such an evening hour—but a further strangeness came with the thought that she actually did not possess a "boy" at all. Nobody to wait for her at the gate when she went out in the evening. No one to hang round the pay-box at the promenade entrance to take her home. The sense of missing something was a great deal stronger now than the sense of freedom; she almost wished she had kept in with Wilf, despite that other feeling that made her desire to break with him.
It was a relief to mingle with the crowd coming out from the promenade, because people might suppose she had just left her post at the gate; but she still kept that odd sensation—lightened of a weight, and yet comfortless—as if she had "cast" something which had been more necessary to her than she ever realized.