'I've come to say good-bye. We're going to-morrow. It'll be rather ripping getting home and getting some cricket and tennis, only I'm simply too awfully slack for anything after all this fooling round doing nothing. Feel.' She held out a plump arm for Betty to pinch. 'Horrid flabby, isn't it? And I say, I'm awfully sick at having to say good-bye, you know.'
The round face was tragically despondent. Miranda had scarcely realized till now how much she liked the Crevequers. She said so.
'You are rotters, you two, but you do make things go, you know,' she explained, a little embarrassed at her own frankness. 'And, I say, I hope we all meet again sometime—not in this beastly place, but at home. You might come and stay with us; you'd get some hockey. Oh, I forgot; you don't care about doing things. But it's beastly saying good-bye. I hate it.'
'So do I,' Betty said. 'So I never do it. Let's not. Let's come and have ices instead.'
They went and had ices at Caflisch's, and the pathos of the occasion was salient. Miranda, after the second ice, worked up at length to:
'It's all very well, but I like your sort of people, if it is different (like Warren said once, and mother says), a jolly sight better than ours—so there!'
'It's all a q-question of taste, of course,' Betty said. 'And now I must go; and as we aren't going to say good-bye, there's no more to be said. I hope we shall all of us have a j-jolly summer.'
'Please say good-bye for me,' said Miranda tearfully, referring to Tommy, who had a pedestal of his own. 'And I hope he'll soon be better, and ... oh dear!'
So that parting was effected. It should, after all, count for something that one's friends should weep to say good-bye.
Next day the Venables left Naples.