"
"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.
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