“Isn’t it?”

“No.  How could it be?  You don’t call Mr. Soper nice, do you?”

Spinks was really quiet for a moment.  “I say, Flossie, have you and Rickets been ’aving a bit of a tiff?”

“What do you want to know that for?  It’s nothing to you.”

“Well, it isn’t just my curiosity.  It’s because I might be able to help you, Floss, if you didn’t mind telling me what it was.  I’m not a clever fellow, but there’s no one in this house understands old Razors as well as I do.”

“Then you must be pretty sharp, for I can’t understand him at all.  Has he been saying anything to you?”

“Oh no, he wouldn’t say anything.  You don’t talk about these things, you know.”

“I thought he might—­to you.”

“Me?  I’m the very last person he’d dream of talking to.”

“I thought you were such friends.”

“So we are.  But you see he never talks about you to me, Flossie.”

“Why ever not?”

“That’s why.  Because we’re friends.  Because he wouldn’t think it fair—­”

“Fair to who?”

“To me, of course.”

“Why shouldn’t it be fair to you?” Her eyes, close-lidded, were fixed upon the floor.  As long as she looked at him Spinks held himself well in hand; but the sudden withdrawing of those dangerous weapons threw him off his guard.

“Because he knows I—­Oh hang it all, that’s what I swore I wouldn’t say.”

“You haven’t said it.”

“No, but I’ve made you see it.”

His handsome face stiffened with horror at his stupidity.  To let fall the slightest hint of his feeling was, he felt, the last disloyalty to Rickman.  He had a vague idea that he ought instantly to go.  But instead of going he sat there, silent, fixing on his own enormity a mental stare so concentrated that it would have drawn Flossie’s attention to it, if she had not seen it all the time.

“If there’s anything to see,” said she, “there’s no reason why I shouldn’t see it.”

“P’raps not.  There’s every reason, though, why I should have held my silly tongue.”

“Why, what difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you, of course, and it can’t make any difference—­really—­to him; but it’s a downright dishonourable thing to do, and that makes a jolly lot of difference to me.  You see, I haven’t any business to go and feel like this.”

“Oh well, you can’t help your feelings, can you?” she said softly.  “Anybody may have feelings—­”

“Yes, but a decent chap, you know, wouldn’t let on that he had any—­at least, not when the girl he—­he—­you know what I mean, it’s what I mustn’t say—­when she and the other fellow weren’t hitting it off very well together.”

“Oh, you think it might make a difference then?”

“No, I don’t—­not reelly.  It’s only the feeling I have about it, don’t you see.  It seems somehow so orf’ly mean.  Razors wouldn’t have done it if it had been me, you know.”