“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.”
“From me, then?”
No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.