"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it,
to 'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."
This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful.
"I might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might
give him what they call here the tip--that he's not to know me when we
meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."
"Do you want to run away from him?"
It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. "I don't
know _what_ I want to run away from!"
It dispelled, on the spot--something, to the elder woman's ear, in the
sad, sweet sound of it--any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense
was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some
island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every
conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and
the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the
sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now
for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you like."