s
friend's face that his trouble was financial, a matter of five bob, or
fifteen at the very worst. And you could trust Boots to pay up any day.
So that he was properly floored when Boots, in a thick, earnest voice,
explained the nature of the service he required--that he, Ransome,
should go with him, nightly, to a convenient corner of Oxford Street,
and there collar that kid, Winny Dymond, and lug her along.

"Do you mean," asked Ransome, "walk home with her?"

Well, yes; that, Booty intimated, was about the size of it. She was a
Wandsworth girl, and they'd got, he supposed, all four of them, to get
there.

He was trying to carry it off, to give an air of inevitability to his
preposterous proposal. But as young Ransome's face expressed his agony,
Booty became almost abject in supplication. He didn't know, Ranny
didn't, what it was to be situated like he, Booty, was. Booty wanted to
know how he'd feel if it was him. To be gone on a girl like he was and
only see her of an evenin' and then not be able to get any nearer her,
because of havin' to make polite remarks to that wretched kid she was
always cartin' round. At that rate he might just as well not be engaged
at all--to Maudie; better engage himself to the bloomin' kid at once. It
wasn't as if he had a decent chance of bein' spliced for good in a year
or two's time. His evenin's and his Sundays and so forth were jolly well
all he'd got. It was all very well for Ransome, _he_ wasn't gone on a
girl, else he'd know how erritatin' it was to the nerves. And if Ranny
hadn't got the spunk to stand by a pal and see him through, why, then
he'd cut the Poly. and make Maudie cut it too.

To most of this Ranny was silent, for it seemed to him that Boots was
mad, or near it. But at that threat, so terrible to him, so terrible to
the Polytechnic, so terrible to Booty, and so palpable a sign of his
madness, he gave in. He said it was all right, only he didn't know what
on earth he was to say to her.

Booty recovered his natural airiness. "Oh," he threw it off, "you say
nothing."

And for the first night or so, as far as Ransome could remember, that
was what he did say.

And he wasn't really clever at collaring her, either. There was
something elusive, fugitive, uncatchable about Winny Dymond. It was
Booty, driven by love to that extremity, who collared Maudie and walked
off with her, with a suddenness and swiftness that left them stranded
and amazed. "Fair pace-makin'," Ran