“I don’t know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I’ve got to be educated somewhere,—in France, perhaps,—I don’t know where; but I shall be glad to go away.”
“I shan’t like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie, is it really true you’re going? Then these holidays will be the last I shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish——”
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the milk-white sea beyond.
“I wish,” she said, after a pause, “that I could see you again sometime.
You wish that, too?”
“Yes, but it would have been better if—if—you had—shot straight over there—down by the breakwater.”
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma’s horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. “How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I’m quite miserable enough already.”
“Why? Because you’re going away from Mrs. Jennett?”
“No.”