He waited for a moment, and then he said that when his friend went back to Aldershot he found "he wasn't any more in love with that girl than he was with the cat. It was all just a beastly mistake. So he got leave and went home to think it out. _Couldn't_ think it out. Felt he'd better go and talk it over with somebody----" Ranny hesitated again. "Awful hole to be in, isn't it?" I agreed it must have been very dreadful for his friend to have to tell the girl he'd made a mistake. "Oh, but he couldn't do _that_!" With a shocked look, Ranny stopped dead for a second. Then, as he went on, he said that he had told his friend of course he'd have to go through with it. "You don't mean," I said, "that when he was feeling like that you think he ought to let the poor girl marry him!" He said I didn't see the point. It would probably spoil the girl's life if his friend drew back. I said he would spoil her life if he didn't draw back. Ranny looked merely bewildered. "Oh ... but ..." then he caught hold of a mainstay, "my friend--he isn't a cad you know. A man _can't_ back out of a thing like that." Then I told him, without the names, about Guy Whitby-Dawson. Guy had "backed out." Guy had made up his mind to the sacrifice of "running in single harness," and had said so, frankly. I praised him. "Naturally," Ranny answered, "if people hadn't enough money to marry, nobody would expect them to marry. But in the case I'm talking about," he said gloomily, "the man, my friend, is an eldest son. He is going to have--oh, it's rotten luck!" I asked him if he really thought that not to have enough money to keep house on was worse than not to have enough love to keep house on. He said that what _he_ thought wasn't the question. The question was what the girl would think. And what the girl's family would think. I asked how anybody was to know what the girl would think unless she was asked. Ranny gave his rough head a despairing shake. Of course I couldn't tell him half of what I felt about that girl, but I kept seeing her. Very happy. Never dreaming what her lover was feeling. I saw them going up the church aisle to be married. All the smiling and congratulating afterwards. I saw them "going away." And I felt sick. But I did try to make him feel a little for the girl. He said that "feeling for the girl" was precisely what had decided the business. The girl _couldn't_ be told the truth. "She'll guess it!" But that didn't comfort him as I had expected. "Even if she guesses she couldn't be expected to release--m--my friend." "Why?" "Because," said Ranny with his childlike air, "because she'll probably never have as good an offer again."