or his failure to
defend her from the insulting advances of the City gentleman. But
perhaps she would hardly have taken it so seriously, if it had not
been significant to her of a still more intolerable desertion. Ada
Bishop had said something to her just before they started, something
that had been almost too much even for Flossie's complacency.

"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