“I’m glad,” she still heard Ada saying, “you’re going to take him out all day.  If I were you I shouldn’t let him see too much of that Miss Harden.”

There hadn’t been much to take hold of in Ada’s words, but Ada’s manner had made them unmistakable; and from that moment a little worm had begun to gnaw at Flossie’s heart.

And he, as he looked at her with that strange new sight of his that was already bringing sorrow to them both, he said to himself that he supposed it was her “going about,” her sad acquaintance with unlovely manners, that had made her as she was.  Only how was it that he had never noticed it before?  Poor little girl; it was only last Saturday when they had come back from looking over the house at Ealing that, drawing upon all the appropriate resources of natural history, he had called her a little vesper Vole, because she lived in a Bank and only came out of it in the evening.  What Flossie called him that time didn’t matter; it was her parsimony in the item of endearments that provoked him to excesses of the kind.  And now the thought of those things made him furious; furious with himself; furious with Fate for throwing Flossie in his way; furious with Flossie for being there.  And when he was ready to damn her because she was a woman, he melted, and could have wept because she was a Beaver.  Poor little girl; one day to be called a vesper Vole, the next to be forgotten altogether, the next to be remembered after this fashion.

And so they went on silently together, Flossie in pain because of the little worm gnawing at her heart, he thinking many things, sad and bitter and tender things, of the woman walking by his side.  From time to time she looked at him as she had looked at those City gentlemen, not turning her head, but slewing the large dark of her eye into its corner.  Presently she spoke.

“You don’t seem to have very much to say for yourself to-day.”

“To-day?  I’m not given to talking very much at any time.”

“Oh, come, you don’t seem to have any difficulty in talking to Miss Harden.  I’ve heard you.  Wot a time you did sit yesterday.  And you were up there an hour or more before I came, I know.”

“Three quarters of an hour, to be strictly accurate.”

“Well, that was long enough, wasn’t it?”

“Quite long enough for all I had to say.”

Now that was playing into Flossie’s hands, for it meant that he had had nothing to say after her arrival.  And she was sharp enough to see it.

“That’s all very well, Keith,” said she, apparently ignoring her advantage, “but Ada says they’ll be talking if she keeps on asking you up there just when she’s all by herself.  It’s not the thing to do.  I wouldn’t do it if it was me, no more would Ada.”

“My dear child, Miss Harden may do a great many things that you and Ada mayn’t.  Because, you see, she knows how to do them and you don’t.”

“Oh well, if you’re satisfied.  But it isn’t very nice for me to ’ave you talked about, just when we’re going to be married, is it?”