“Let's use the rest of the cartridges first,” said Dick; and he helped Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,—a descent that she was quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and Dick blushed.
“It's very pretty,” he said.
“Pooh!” said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an indefinite length of time till such date as——A gust of the growing wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma “a little beast,” and for a moment he was in the dark,—a darkness that stung. The bullet went singing out to the empty sea.
“Spoilt my aim,” said he, shaking his head. “There aren't any more cartridges; we shall have to run home.” But they did not run. They walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their years.
“And I shall be——” quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: “I don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!”
“Be an artist, then,” said Maisie. “You're always laughing at my trying to draw; and it will do you good.”
“I'll never laugh at anything you do,” he answered. “I'll be an artist, and I'll do things.”
“Artists always want money, don'tthey?”
“I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin with.”
“Ah, I'm rich,” said Maisie. “I've got three hundred a year all my own when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,—just a father or a mother.”