"It doesn't pay at all. I wouldn't give her up,—nor she me. She was about as pretty a girl as I remember to have seen."
"I suppose you were a decent-looking fellow in those days yourself. They say so, but I never quite believed it."
"There wasn't much in that," said Ned. "Girls don't want a man to be good-looking, but that he should speak up and not be afraid of them. There were lots of fellows came after her. You remember Blinks, of the Carabineers. He was full of money, and he asked her three times. She is an old maid to this day, and is living as companion to some crusty crochetty countess."
"I think you did behave badly, Ned. Why didn't you set her free?"
"Of course, I behaved badly. And why didn't she set me free, if you come to that? I might have found a female Blinks of my own,—only for her. I wonder whether it will come against us when we die, and whether we shall be brought up together to receive punishment."
"Not if you repent, I suppose," said Tom Spooner, very seriously.
"I sometimes ask myself whether she has repented. I made her swear that she'd never give me up. She might have broken her word a score of times, and I wish she had."
"I think she was a fool, Ned."
"Of course she was a fool. She knows that now, I dare say. And perhaps she has repented. Do you mean to try it again with that girl at Harrington Hall?"
Mr. Thomas Spooner did mean to try it again with the girl at Harrington Hall. He had never quite trusted the note which he had got from his friend Chiltern, and had made up his mind that, to say the least of it, there had been very little friendship shown in the letter. Had Chiltern meant to have stood to him "like a brick," as he ought to have stood by his right hand man in the Brake country, at any rate a fair chance might have been given him. "Where the devil would he be in such a country as this without me,"—Tom had said to his cousin,—"not knowing a soul, and with all the shooting men against him? I might have had the hounds myself,—and might have 'em now if I cared to take them. It's not standing by a fellow as he ought to do. He writes to me, by George, just as he might do to some fellow who never had a fox about his place."