Rickman, if you please, because he was considered to have entangled himself so inextricably with her.  She knew that Miss Roots maintained that it was all her (Flossie’s) own fault for holding Keith to his engagement; that Mr. Partridge had wondered why girls were in such a hurry to get married; and that Mr. Soper said she’d made a great mistake in ever taking up with a young fellow you could depend on with so little certainty.  And the burden of it all was that Flossie had made a fool of herself and been made a fool of.  So she was very bitter in her little heart against the man who was the cause of it all; and if she did not instantly throw Keith Rickman over, that was because Flossie was not really such a fool as for the moment she had been made to look.

But there was one person of the boarding-house whose opinion was as yet unknown to Flossie or to anybody else; it was doubtful indeed if it was known altogether to himself; for Mr. Spinks conceived that honour bound him to a superb reticence on the subject.  He had followed with breathless anxiety every turn in the love affairs of Flossie and his friend.  He could not deny that a base and secret exultation had possessed him on the amazing advent of Miss Harden; for love had made him preternaturally keen, and he was visited with mysterious intimations of the truth.  He did not encourage these visitings.  He had tried hard to persuade himself that he was glad for Flossie’s sake when Miss Harden went away; when, whatever there had been between Rickets and the lady, it had come to nothing; when the wedding day remained fixed, immovably fixed.  But he had not been glad at all.  On the contrary he had suffered horribly, and had felt the subsequent delay as a cruel prolongation of his agony.  In the irony of destiny, shortly before the fatal twenty-fifth, Mr. Spinks had been made partner in his uncle’s business, and was now enjoying an income superior to Rickman’s not only in amount but in security.  If anything could have added to his dejection it was that.  His one consolation hitherto had been that after all, if Rickman did marry Flossie, as he was not in a position to marry her, it came to the same thing in the long run.  Now he saw himself cut off from that source of comfort by a solid four hundred a year with prospects of a rise.  He could forego the obviously impossible; but in that rosy dawn of incarnation his dream appeared more than ever desirable.  Whenever Mr. Spinks’s imagination encountered the idea of marriage it had tried to look another way.  Marriage remote and unattainable left Mr. Spinks’s imagination in comparative peace; but brought within the bounds of possibility its appeal was simply maddening.  And now, bringing it nearer still, so near that it was impossible to look another way, there came these disturbing suggestions of a misunderstanding between Rickman and his Beaver.  The boarding-house knew nothing but that the wedding was put off because Rickman was