Though maid to a lady accounted very fine, Suzanne, in presence of beauty unadorned, was a simple and kind-hearted enthusiast in her art. Before lunch-time next day she had done so well for Amaryllis out of Lady Elizabeth Bruffin's wardrobe, that she declared, with conviction to fill up the gap in evidence, "que mademoiselle n'a jamais pu paraitre plus seduisante, plus pimpante qu'aujourd'hui."

"How can she know that?" asked Amaryllis laughing.

"Because nothing possible could be, you pretty creature," said Lady Elizabeth, glowing with pleasure in the success of her nursing and in the quality of Dick Bellamy's conquest.

She had, indeed, good reason: eleven hours' sleep, with redundant happiness and bodily health as elastic as a child's, had made Amaryllis scarcely more delightful to her new friends' eyes than to her own. For on this Sunday morning she looked into her glass for the first time through a man's eyes.

In spite of her beauty, however, and of her joy in the man who was to see and praise it, there was yet in her heart a pricking as of conscience.

In the night there had come to her, for the first time since Dick had saved her from the Dutchwoman and her knife, the memory of Randal Bellamy; of his kindness, of his favour with her father and of his love for herself.

She did not now feel as she had felt in his study before she fell asleep; she did not even define the feeling which had then made her tears flow; and she understood, with the memory of Dick's kisses on her face, that Randal was not wounded as Dick would have been in losing her.

She had not wronged Randal, nor had she any sense of wrong-doing; for to love Dick was a natural thing to do—and a wise thing. It was even a praiseworthy deed: for that this wonderful Dick of all men should go without any smallest thing which he desired, would have been wicked indeed.

The sting was this: Randal did not yet know that she was Dick's, nor Dick that Randal would have had her his own. And she believed that it would hurt Randal less in the end to learn the tremendous news from her mouth than from her father's, Dick's or Lady Elizabeth's; and from Lady Elizabeth she knew she could not keep it long, having a suspicion, even, that she knew it already.

She must see Randal before Dick should come to her. She must tell Randal the most wonderful and most inevitable thing of that terrible and glorious yesterday. And Randal must decide whether Dick was to know what Randal had asked and offered. And if Dick was to know, Randal must decide by whom, and when.

If Randal wished it hidden, she could never tell it—not even to Dick.

For Amaryllis, even before she had "put her hair up," had learned to hate the woman who tries to hide her nakedness with a belt of scalps.

As these thoughts ran through her head, Amaryllis frowned between her eyebrows.

"A fly in the ointment, after all?" asked Lady Elizabeth, smiling so that one knew there was none in hers.

"Only something I remembered. I want——"

"Won't ask, shan't have," said Lady Elizabeth.

"Will Sir Randal Bellamy be here to lunch?" asked the girl.

"I hope so, my dear. He's with Dick—or was—sitting on the bed to keep him down till the doctor came. He's like a hen with one chick over that brother of his."

And Lady Elizabeth Bruffin laughed.

"I think it's—it's beautiful," said Amaryllis, with a shade of indignation in her voice.

"Yes—quite. That's why I laughed."

"I know," replied the girl, unwrinkling her forehead. "I often want to laugh for that." And then, after a moment's pause, she added: "Please, I want to speak to Sir Randal for a moment, before lunch."

"You shall. Heroines must have things made smooth for them, mustn't they, at the end of the book?"

And she took the girl, fresh from Suzanne's finishing touches, to George's study.

"George won't be coming in for half an hour, dear," she said. "There are heaps of papers and books, but no looking-glass. So you'll be able to forget your pretty self for a few minutes."

And off went the fairy godmother—to meet Sir Randal Bellamy on the stairs.

"But you're staying to lunch," she expostulated.

"If you say so, of course I am," said Randal.

"I've left Amaryllis in George's study. She wants you to see I have looked after her as well as if she'd been at home with her father and you."

She passed him, but turned two steps above.

"I wish you'd seen Dr. Caldegard looking at her fast asleep in bed last night," she said in a low voice, very tender. "It was a picture—the kind one keeps."

"Yes," said Randal. "I was in the other room, you know, looking at mine."

And he went down the stair, wondering how a woman he had seen last night for the first time had managed to get that sentimental speech out of him.

Amaryllis rose as he entered, and almost ran to meet him.

"Oh, Randal!" she cried.

He had known his gentle doom on the Friday; and her "Randal," tout court, sealed it, for never had she used his name so to him before. It came now, he knew, not in his own right, but through Dick.

In a single emotion, he was sorry and glad—more glad, he told himself, than sorry. For the sadness seemed to have been with him a long time, while the joy was new.

A little while she babbled of the trouble and pain she had given them.

"You and poor dad! If only I could have yelled out in time!"

"To get a knife in you, my dear—no, it's been all just right. Why, we should never have got the Dope of the Gods back, without you."

And when she laughed, he told her how her father had growled: "Oh, damn the Ambrotox!" and how he had lectured the potentate on nervous exhaustion.

But when a little silence fell between them, Amaryllis took a deep breath and plunged, saying in a half-stifled voice, "I want to tell you something."

"Tell away, child," he replied, smiling benignantly on her, though his heart beat heavily, telling him her tale beforehand.

"It's—it's Dick," she said, and broke down.

"Dick?" he responded. "Of course it's Dick—and Dick it is going to be; Dick for breakfast, Dick for lunch, and Dick for dinner."

"Yes," said Amaryllis, tears running at last, but voice steady. "Dick for ever, I think. It feels like that, Randal dear."

"If it depends on him it will be," said Dick's brother.

"If it depends on me, it shall be," answered the girl.

"Then what's the dear silly child crying for?" he asked.

"I—I don't know," she replied weakly.

"That's a dear silly little lie—you know as well as I do. Although you've been perfectly honest with me, you have a dear silly feeling that the things which have happened so suddenly have been unfair to me. When I spoke to you last, my dear, you were surer than ever that you'd never want me. You didn't know why you were surer than ever—because you were afraid to look and see. Young women all, I suppose, have a moment when they won't look into that dear silly cupboard. But I looked at the blind door of it, and I—well, I guessed what was inside."

The tears would not stop. There was no sobbing nor convulsion of throat or breath. They just ran out in tribute to the man's goodness.

But Randal explained them with a difference.

"The tears from your left eye come tumbling out over the edge of the well of your kindness for me," he said. "You would like me to have everything I want. But you know that Dick must have everything that you are. So there it is. But the tears out of your dear silly right eye are silly sham jewels, sparkling with dear injured vanity. You're afraid I shall somehow think you played a crooked little game with me. I don't."

The silly little handkerchief was getting the best of it.

"When you've quite turned that silly tap off," he went on, "I'll tell you something else."

He got up and walked away from her, looked at two prints which he did not see, lit a cigarette which he could not taste, and came back to a pale-faced, dry-eyed Amaryllis—a girl with a smile on her face that was a woman's smile.

"Tell me that other thing," she said.

"I don't suppose that it'll be altogether news to you, any more than yours was to me. But it's this: For a good long time I resisted you—just and only because the more I admired you, the more I couldn't help thinking that Dick ought to have his chance—what I knew was one of the great chances. Then I got weak, and last Wednesday I tried to grab mine, before he'd even had a look in. I felt mean—and I couldn't stop myself. That afternoon he came, and—well, as it turned out, saved me from the agonies of gout. I always get it, when I've done anything off colour."

"You!" said Amaryllis. "D'you know what he told me, the day we drove to Oxford?"

"Some silly yarn."

"A dear story, not a bit silly. He said he daren't admire a gun or a book or a horse of yours, for fear you'd force it on him. Said it was a mercy of Providence that your size and shape permitted him to admire your coats and trousers."

"Well," asked Randal, "doesn't he deserve the best of everything?"

"Oh, yes!" declared the girl eagerly.

"This time," said Bellamy, "he's getting it. And it's God's truth, my dear, that it makes me unspeakably happy."

Amaryllis put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him.

And then George came in with The Sunday Telegram.

"Raid on a West-End Flat!" he grumbled. "Nice, respectable lot you are, getting me mixed up with a thing like this!" And he read out:

"'In consequence of information which has come into the hands of the police——' and all the usual jabber. And the placards are screaming 'Secret Dope Factories' all over this moral city. 'World-wide Organisation to be Broken Up.' 'Five Leaders Arrested.' They'll be getting me and Betsy into the witness-box."

"Come off it, George," said Dick from the doorway. "You and Liz aren't going to get boomed in this stunt. Put your money into pars about your yacht and your stables, if the 'Palatial Home' gadget's wearing thin."

His smile was almost straight again, Amaryllis thought, and there was little sign upon him of what he had been through, except the patch of black plaster on his left cheek, and the accentuated limp with which he came across the room to her.

"Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed. "What a lovely coat!"

"That's just what I was going to say about you," he answered, taking her hand. "We look a bit different, don't we?"

"Sent me in a cab, as if I were his valet," said Randal, "to fetch his newest and purplest raiment from his beastly little flat."

"Nothing like it," said George, "to take the taste of savagery out of the mouth. If the proletariat would only dress for dinner every night, we shouldn't have any labour troubles. The Nationalisation of the Dinner-jacket would be death to the Agitator. They say Abe Grinnel is drafting a bill to make it illegal."

Lady Elizabeth came in with Caldegard. Amaryllis soon had her father at one end of the room in a subdued conversation of which the hostess had little difficulty in guessing the subject. The two brothers, she observed, had come together at the other end, and were looking out of the window across the park. She took George discreetly away from his own room.

Of yesterday Randal and Dick had already talked much that morning; but of that adventure which he accounted the greatest, Dick had said nothing.

"Amaryllis has told me," said Randal.

"I'm glad," said Dick. "It didn't come easy to start the subject. I'm not used to it yet."

"Neither of you could have done better," said the elder brother. "I congratulate you, dear boy. And I want to give you—to make you a present of a thing that isn't mine—couldn't have been mine, anyhow. But, all the same, I give it you."

"Thanks," replied the younger. "But what the devil d'you mean?"

Randal looked at him.

"You don't mean—you——" began Dick, and stopped short, shocked by conviction.

"Yes, I do. And I don't think I should ever have let you know it, Dick, but that it doesn't seem comfortable for a girl to carry about with her even a little thing like that which she can't speak of to her husband. So now you know. And there is a way of giving even what one could not withhold. She's perfect, Dick."

"Like the giver," said his brother.

And it was to Randal also that he owed the few minutes which he was able to get alone with Amaryllis before lunch.

He went up to Caldegard.

"Have you heard Bruffin describe Dick's solo on the dinner-bells—last night, you know? Well come and see if he's in the hall now," he said, and dragged the old man away.

Left alone together,

"It's like a dream," said Amaryllis; and, "Which!" asked Dick.

"Yesterday," said the girl, peering at his calm face.

"It's this that's like dreaming, to me," he answered. "When you're awake you make things happen. When you're asleep, things have the best of it—make you follow their lead. Yesterday, Amaryllis, I was some bloke, because I was useful to you. If I'd had time to think, I'd have thought very strong beer of myself. But now I'm—oh, a giddy little stranger that's taken the wrong turning and got in among the Birds of Paradise."

And he touched gingerly the sleeve of her frock,

"Lady Elizabeth's," she said. "You score. Dick. You've got your own, and they fit."

"Do I fit?" asked Dick.

"You don't really mean you feel strange and lost in this dream, do you?" she asked a little anxiously.

"I don't mean I feel strange in civilised life. That's only a variation on savagery—a mere matter of degree—and I like it well enough. I can talk the language, dear child, when I'm in the country. But you are my new life, and I'm—well, dazzled, let's call it. Yesterday I had to fetch you home and see that you didn't get hurt. Now, I've got to make you happier every day for the next fifty odd years. It's a tall order, and there's lots to do. I ought to begin."

"You began when you found me crying in Randal's study, Dick."

"Oh, it's easy to make people less wretched," he objected. "That's why yesterday was, on the whole, a success. But—are you happy?"

"Awfully! Oh, just awfully!" murmured Amaryllis.

"There it is!" sighed Dick, with the humour which she knew already for the natural shell of some wise little kernel. "And I've got to give you, as you give me, the keen edge of appetite for all the world and for all the people that play about in it. The stuff's all there, but——"

"Why, Dick, it's the same thing, after all, as yesterday. You saved me from beasts and from fear and from myself. You made me laugh, and you made me love—even made me love Tod, and poor PÉpe, and the bees, and the round-faced girl in the cottage they bumbled round; and 'Opeful 'Arry; and you brought me home to a fairy godmother. If you could do all that in a day, Dick, just think what a lot of laughing and loving you'll be able to dig out of fifty years. And I won't let you off. Wake up, Dick. There's no dreaming about it all."

So they woke up together.

At the lunch-table, Amaryllis looked round her, and felt the last of her troubles was over.

Randal showed, she thought, a face more serene and contented than she had ever before seen him wear.

During the earlier part of the meal the talk went to and fro over the track of what George rashly called the Amarylliad.

Randal told him the word was falsely constructed, Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid being, he said, syncopated adjectival forms derived from their respective substantive stems.

"Ours," said George, "has been a rag-time Dunciad."

And when the coffee and George's elbows were on the table, and four of his irresistible cigars alight:

"And us," he said, "not to get one little puff out of it all!"

"Advertisement," said Randal, "is the false dawn of fame. You, Mr. Bruffin, do not, I believe, need it, and will certainly not get it out of the Dope Drama. Miss Caldegard and my brother, who are likely to get a great deal, will hate it."

Amaryllis flushed a little at the coupling of names, but faced it bravely.

Her father drew a crumpled newspaper from his pocket.

"'Mysterious Murders near Millsborough,'" he read out. "'Injured Man in Empty House. Bearded Man Stabbed in Lonely Wood. Dead Chinaman on Deserted Roman Road. Abandoned Automobile.'"

"Inquests!" said George.

"Horrid!" said Amaryllis.

"Rescued Damsel!" said Lady Elizabeth.

"Scientist's Daughter Abducted!" cackled Caldegard.

"Lightning Pursuit by Gallant Airman!" boomed George.

"Dope Gang Baffled!" chuckled Randal. "And we understand that the interesting heroine will shortly reward——"

Lady Elizabeth shot a keen glance at Amaryllis and Amaryllis answered it boldly.

"Oh, of course!" she said.

George, having caught the look, seized upon the words.

"I wish to propose the health," he said, himself raising his glass, "of Miss Caldegard, coupling it with that of my ancient friend and fellow-filibuster, Limping Dick."

When four on their feet had toasted the two sitting, Randal spoke seriously.

"The inquests are likely to begin about Wednesday next," he said. "If you two children get yourselves neatly married on Monday, you will be pursued by subp[oe]nas to the Isle of Wight, say, and able to show up and get your evidence begun at least at the second sitting, about a week later. There'll be a paragraph or two before that, and by the time the evidence is reported, you'll be a settled married couple, and the romance will have evaporated."

"Oh, Randal!" said the girl reproachfully.

"Evaporated from the print and paper, dear child," he explained paternally. "Take my advice, and you'll just about break the hearts of the reporters."

"Amaryllis and I," said Lady Elizabeth, rising, "will withdraw and hold counsel. An interim report will be issued at tea."

THE END.