“Good-bye?”—he appealed, but without moving. “I don’t quite see my way, but I won’t give you up,” she repeated. “There. Good-bye.” It brought him with a jerk to his feet, tossing away his cigarette. His poor face was flushed. “See here—see here!” “No, I won’t; but I must leave you now,” she went on as if not hearing him. “See here—see here!” He tried, from the bench, to take her hand again. But that definitely settled it for her: this would, after all, be as bad as his asking her to supper. “You mustn’t come with me—no, no!” He sank back, quite blank, as if she had pushed him. “I mayn’t see you home?” “No, no; let me go.” He looked almost as if she had struck him, but she didn’t care; and the manner in which she spoke—it was literally as if she were angry—had the force of a command. “Stay where you are!” “See here—see here!” he nevertheless pleaded. “I won’t give you up!” she cried once more—this time quite with passion; on which she got away from him as fast as she could and left him staring after her. CHAPTER XVIII. Mr. Mudge had lately been so occupied with their famous “plans” that he had neglected for a while the question of her transfer; but down at Bournemouth, which had found itself selected as the field of their recreation by a process consisting, it seemed, exclusively of innumerable pages of the neatest arithmetic in a very greasy but most orderly little pocket-book, the distracting possible melted away—the fleeting absolute ruled the scene. The plans, hour by hour, were simply superseded, and it was much of a rest to the girl, as she sat on the pier and overlooked the sea and the company, to see them evaporate in rosy fumes and to feel that from moment to moment there was less left to cipher about. The week proves blissfully fine, and her mother, at their lodgings—partly to her embarrassment and partly to her relief—struck up with the landlady an alliance that left the younger couple a great deal of freedom. This relative took her pleasure of a week at Bournemouth in a stuffy back-kitchen and endless talks; to that degree even that Mr. Mudge himself—habitually inclined indeed to a scrutiny of all mysteries and to seeing, as he sometimes admitted, too much in things—made remarks on it as he sat on the cliff with his betrothed, or on the decks of steamers that conveyed them, close-packed items in terrific totals of enjoyment, to the Isle of Wight and the Dorset coast.