Her tears helped her really to dissimulate, for she had instantly, in so
public a situation, to recover herself. They had come and gone in half a
minute, and she immediately explained them. "It's only because I'm
tired. It's that--it's that!" Then she added a trifle incoherently: "I
shall never see you again."

"Ah but why not?" The mere tone in which her companion asked this
satisfied her once for all as to the amount of imagination for which she
could count on him. It was naturally not large: it had exhausted itself
in having arrived at what he had already touched upon--the sense of an
intention in her poor zeal at Cocker's. But any deficiency of this kind
was no fault in him: he wasn't obliged to have an inferior cleverness--to
have second-rate resources and virtues. It had been as if he almost
really believed she had simply cried for fatigue, and he accordingly put
in some kind confused plea--"You ought really to take something: won't
you have something or other _somewhere_?" to which she had made no
response but a headshake of a sharpness that settled it. "Why shan't we
all the more keep meeting?"

"I mean meeting this way--only this way. At my place there--_that_ I've
nothing to do with, and I hope of course you'll turn up, with your
correspondence, when it suits you. Whether I stay or not, I mean; for I
shall probably not stay."

"You're going somewhere else?" he put it with positive anxiety.

"Yes, ever so far away--to the other end of London. There are all sorts
of reasons I can't tell you; and it's practically settled. It's better
for me, much; and I've only kept on at Cocker's for _you_."