“What would you think enough to marry on, then?”

“Well, I shouldn’t care to do it much under four hundred myself,” he said guardedly.

“And I suppose if you hadn’t it you’d expect a girl to wait for you any time until you’d made it?”

“Well of course I should, if we were engaged already.  But I shouldn’t ask any girl to marry me unless I could afford to keep her—­”

“You wouldn’t ask, but—­”

“No, and I wouldn’t let on that I cared for her either.  I wouldn’t let on under four hundred—­certain.”

“Oh,” said Flossie very quietly.  And Spinks was crushed under a sense of fresh disloyalty to Rickman.  His defence of Rickman had been made to turn into a pleading for himself.  “But Razors is different; he’ll be making twice that in no time, you’ll see.  I shouldn’t be afraid to ask any one if I was him.”

Vainly the honourable youth sought to hide his splendour; Flossie had drawn from him all she needed now to know.

“Look, here, Floss, you say it’s broken off.  Would you mind telling me was it you—­or was it he who did it?” His tone expressed acute anxiety on this point, for in poor Spinks’s code of honour it made all the difference.  But he felt that his question was clearly answered, for the silence of Razors argued sufficiently that it was he.

“Well,” said Flossie with a touch of maidenly dignity, “whichever it was, it wasn’t likely to be Keith.”

Spinks’s face would have fallen, but for its immense surprise.  In this case Rickman ought, yes, he certainly ought to have told him.  It wasn’t behaving quite straight, he considered, to keep it from the man who had the best right in the world to know, a fellow who had always acted straight with him.  But perhaps, poor chap, he was only waiting a little on the chance of the Beaver changing her mind.

“Don’t you think, Flossie, that if he tried hard he could bring it on again?”

“No, he couldn’t.  Never.  Not if he tried from now till next year.  Not if he went on his bended knees to me.”

Spinks reflected that Rickman’s knees didn’t take kindly to bending.  “Haven’t you been a little, just a little hard on him?  He’s such a sensitive little chap.  If I was a woman I don’t think I could let him go like that.  You might let him have another try.”

Poor Spinks was so earnest, so sincere, so unaffectedly determined not to take advantage of the situation, that it dawned on Flossie that dignity must now yield a little to diplomacy.  She was not making the best possible case for herself by representing the rupture as one-sided.  “To tell you the truth, Sidney, he doesn’t want to try.  We’ve agreed about it.  We’ve both of us found we’d made a great mistake—­“.

“I wish I could be as sure of that.”

“Why, what difference could it make to you?” said Flossie, turning on him the large eyes of innocence, eyes so dark, so deep, that her thoughts were lost in them.