back.--"For Heaven's sake, mind what you are about! You're hurting me frightfully."--"Mind what _you_ are about with _me_. Well, and then?"--"And then I shall be ready to take a farm, and that will be in about ten years time, I suppose."--"Well, and _then_?" she asked with a determination that was dreadful to him.--"Yes--and then," Fred stammered, with a nervous dread of the consequence of what he was going to say, "you will be too old."--His Polly Möller stood for a moment as though rooted to the spot, her eyes blazing with anger, then, bending forward, she struck him on the mouth with the wet bandages she had in her hand, and as she did so, the water in the linen fell upon his neck and ears in spray: "Too _old_? You fool! Too old, did you say?" then snatching up the basin of water she dashed it over his head and shoulders, and ran out of the room. While Fred stood there puffing and blowing, she pushed the door a little open again, and cried: "You'd better never show your face in my kitchen again." That was the end of this love-affair, at least for the present, and it was also the end of the dainty little luncheons eaten in secrecy. Fred Triddelfitz stood motionless where Mary Möller had left him, and thought over the change in his circumstances, and of how essentially this love-affair of his had differed from all his preconceptions and from all the novels he had read, and then he made use in his ill-humour of the same expression that he had used when, soon after his arrival at Pümpelhagen, he had been sent road-mending on a rainy day in November: "I never thought it would be as bad as this!--What a blessing," he added, "that the governor is out, otherwise he'd have been certain to have heard the row she made."