I tried to drag my arm away, but he held it too tight, and proceeded to make the remarkable statement:
"You old ass! Surely you've been sulking long enough."
"Well, I like that," replied I, with an empty laugh. "You drop me, sulk like a pig, and then say it's the other way round—"
"Rot!" he interrupted. "Didn't you deliberately cut me out with Radley?"
"I don't know what you mean," I said, although the hint that I was Radley's favourite always gave me a flush of pleasure.
"And haven't you been hanging on to Penny, just to make me jealous?"
"Never entered my head," I replied promptly, and with truth. "I leave that sort of thing to schoolgirls like you. But it evidently did make you jealous."
"Yes, it did," he admitted with an engaging smile. This softened me; and my affection for him began at once to throb into activity.
"Yes, it did; and now that you've said you're sorry, I feel frightfully lively. Let's go and smash a window or something."
His spirits were infectious, and he dragged me off to the study which his intellectual eminence had recently secured for him. When we arrived there, he tossed me a bag of sweets, which had clearly been bought as a means to sugar the reconciliation, and, dropping into his armchair, stretched his legs in front of him, and said: