She arrived by the end of the fortnight at the highest sense of actual fitness, never doubting that her decision was now complete.

She would just give him a few days more to come back to her on a proper impersonal basis--for even to an embarrassing representative of the casual public a public servant with a conscience did owe something--and then would signify to Mr.Mudge that she was ready for the little home.
It had been visited, in the further talk she had had with him at Bournemouth, from garret to cellar, and they had especially lingered, with their respectively darkened brows, before the niche into which it was to be broached to her mother that she must find means to fit.
He had put it to her more definitely than before that his calculations had allowed for that dingy presence, and he had thereby marked the greatest impression he had ever made on her.

It was a stroke superior even again to his handling of the drunken soldier.

What she considered that in the face of it she hung on at Cocker's for was something she could only have described as the common fairness of a last word.

Her actual last word had been, till it should be superseded, that she wouldn't forsake her other friend, and it stuck to her through thick and thin that she was still at her post and on her honour.