Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/128

 Constance had answered with her demure smile. “Think of the millions of poor people.”

“Oh, bother!” Miss Rainham had laughed, not heartlessly, but happily. “Thank Heaven, I’ve enough to be happy myself and make heaps of other people happy too. And the first step is that no one’s to know I’m rich, so remember that we are two high-school teachers on a holiday.”

“I loathe play-acting,” Constance had said, but she had submitted, and now she sat sketching, and Rosamund in her white gown watched the seagulls and shrimpers from under the sea-wall of Lymchurch.

“And so your holiday’s over in three days,” she was saying to the young man beside her; “it’s been a good time, hasn’t it?”

He did not answer; he was piling up the pebbles in a heap, and always at a certain point the heap collapsed.

“What are you thinking of? Poems again?”

“I had a verse running in my head,” he said apologetically; “it has nothing to do with anything.”

“Write it down at once,” she said imperiously, and he obediently scribbled in his