er 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 The plans, hour by hour, were simply superseded, and it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.

He had a lodging in another house, where he had speedily learned the
importance of keeping his eyes open, and he made no secret of his
suspecting that sinister mutual connivances might spring, under the roof
of his companions, from unnatural sociabilities. At the same time he
fully recognised that as a source of anxiety, not to say of expense, his
future mother-in law would have weighted them more by accompanying their
steps than by giving her hostess, in the interest of the tendency they
considered that they never mentioned, equivalent pledges as to the tea-
caddy and the jam-pot. These were the questions--these indeed the
familiar commodities--that he had now to put into the scales; and his
betrothed had in consequence, during her holiday, the odd and yet
pleasant and almost languid sense of an anticlimax. She had become
conscious of an extraordinary collapse, a surrender to stillness and to
retrospect. She cared neither to walk nor to sail; it was enough for her
to sit on benches and wonder at the sea and taste the air and not be at
Cocker's and not see the counter-clerk. She still seemed to wait for
something--something in the key of the immense discussion