'Next holidays,' said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked
wildly in his hand, 'we'll get another pistol,--central fire,--that will
carry farther.'

'There won't b any next holidays for me,' said Maisie. 'I'm going away.'

'Where to?'

'I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to
be educated somewhere,--in France, perhaps,--I don't know where; but I
shall be glad to go away.'

'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