She was right about the hatred.  An indignant anger was certainly what he felt when he first realized that she had power to make him feel at all.  Her prettiness tormented him; therefore he hated her, and everything about her.  He hated the sound of her little tongue upraised among the boarders, and of her little feet running up and down the stairs.  He hated every glance of her black eyes and every attitude and movement of her plump little body.  More than all he hated the touch of her soft arms as they stirred against him at the tightly packed dinner-table.  Therefore he avoided the dinner-table, and the drawing-room; he avoided as far as possible the house, filled as it was with the disastrous presence.  He fatigued himself with excesses of walking and cycling, in the hope that when he flung himself into his bed at midnight he would be too tired to feel.  And sometimes he was.

At last poor Flossie, weary of conjecture, unbent so far as to seek counsel of Miss Bishop.  For Miss Bishop gave you to understand that on the subject of “gentlemen” there was nothing that she did not know.  It was a little humiliating, for only a month ago Flossie had said to her in strictest confidence, “I feel it in my bones, Ada, that he’s going to come forward this spring.”

Ada laughed coarsely, but not unkindly, at the tale of her perplexity.  Ada had every reason to be sympathetic; for Mr. Rickman once securely attached, Mr. Spinks would be lonely, unappropriated, free.  “Don’t you worry,” said she, “he’s all right.”

“All right?  Can’t you see how frightfully rude he is to me?”

“I should think I did see it.  A jolly lot you know about gentlemen.  You’ve nothing to go on when they’re so everlastingly polite, but when they turn mad like that all of a sudden, you may be sure they’re coming to the point.  To tell you the truth, I didn’t use to think you’d very much chance, Flossie; but when I saw him walk out of the room the other day, I said to myself, ’She’s got ‘im!’”

“I wish I knew.  I don’t want it hanging on for ever.”

“It won’t.  If he doesn’t propose in May, he will in June, when you’ve got a new dress and a new hat.”

Flossie shook her head despairingly.  “I wonder,” said she, “what I’d really better do.  I think sometimes I’d better go away.”

“Well, sometimes that does fetch them; and then, again, sometimes it doesn’t.  It’s risky.  Some girls,” she added reflectively, “try doing their hair another way; but I wouldn’t, if I was you.  That’s risky, too.  If they’re really fond of you, as often as not it only puts them off.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“If you take my advice,” said Miss Bishop, “you’ll not do anything.  You’ll just go on the same as before, as if you hadn’t noticed anything out of the way.”

And Flossie went on just the same as before, with the result that every morning Mr. Rickman sighed more and more heavily as he heard the early patter of those feet upon the floor.