“Now about this afternoon,” he said.  “I vote we take a steamboat down the river.  I’ve made up my mind I must have a look at Greenwich again from the water.  And we both need a blow.”

“But won’t it take a long time?” she mildly objected.

He turned on her violently, and spoke as he had never spoken: 

“What if it does?”

He knew that she was thinking of her infernal father, and he would not have it.  He remembered all that Agg had said.  Assuredly Agg had shown nerve, too much nerve, to tackle him in the way she did, and the more he reflected upon Agg’s interference the more he resented it as impertinent.  Still, Agg had happened to talk sense.

“Oh, nothing!” Marguerite agreed quickly, fearfully.  “I should like to go.  I’ve never been.  Do we go to Chelsea Pier?  Down Fernshaw Road will be the nearest.”

“We’ll go down Beaufort Street,” he decided.  He divined that she had suggested Fernshaw Road in order to avoid passing the end of the Grove, where her father might conceivably see them.  Well, he was not going out of his way to avoid her father.  Nay, he was going slightly out of his way in order to give her father every chance of beholding them together.

Although the day was Saturday there was no stir on Chelsea Pier.  The pier-keeper, indeed, was alone on the pier, which rose high on the urgent flood-tide, so that the gangway to it sloped unusually upwards.  No steamer was in sight, and it seemed impossible that any steamer should ever call at that forlorn and decrepit platform that trembled under the straining of the water.  Nevertheless, a steamer did after a little while appear round the bend, in Battersea Reach; she dropped her funnel, aimed her sharp nose at an arch of Battersea Bridge, and finally, poising herself against the strong stream, bumped very gently and neatly into contact with the pier.  The pier-keeper went through all the classic motions of mooring, unbarring, barring, and casting off, and in a few seconds the throbbing steamer, which was named with the name of a great Londoner, left the pier again with George and Marguerite on board.  Nobody had disembarked.  The shallow and handsome craft, flying its gay flags, crossed and recrossed the river, calling at three piers in the space of a few minutes; but all the piers were like Chelsea Pier; all the pier-keepers had the air of castaways upon shaking islets.  The passengers on the steamer would not have filled a motor-bus, and they carried themselves like melancholy adventurers who have begun to doubt the authenticity of the inspiration which sent them on a mysterious quest.  Such was travel on the Thames in the years immediately before Londoners came to a final decision that the Thames was meet to be ignored by the genteel town which it had begotten.