viting your lady friends to come and take tea with you."

"Just what I said all along, my boy," remarked the experienced Gerald,
wagging his head sagely. "That was what mucked up the show. Wherever
there's a petticoat there's trouble. Oh, I _warned_ them!"

On my way up to bed I flushed Dilly from a window-seat on the staircase,
where she had evidently been lingering on the off-chance of a
supplementary good-night from Dicky.

"Well?" I said severely.

"Well?"

"Do you know what time it is?"

"I expect your wife will tell you that when you get upstairs," said
Dilly.

I tried a fresh line.

"After the labours of to-day, I should have thought you would have been
glad to go to bed," I said. "You imp!" And I laughed. There is something
very disarming about the Twins' misdemeanours.

We turned and walked upstairs together, and paused outside Dilly's door.

"Good-night, Dilly," I said. "I admired your pluck."

"It wasn't me," said Dilly, in a very small voice.

"Not you?"

"N-no. I said I would come, because Dicky said I daren't, and at the
last moment I funked it. (Adrian, I simply couldn't!) So Dolly went
instead."

"Then that was Dolly all the time?"

"Yes."

"And she went, just to--to----"

"To save my face. She's a brick," said Dilly.

This, by the way, was the first occasion on which I realised the truth
of Robin's dictum that Dilly and Dolly were girls of widely different
character.

"And didn't the others recognise her?"

"No. That's the best of it!"

"Not Dicky?"

"No."

"Not even Robin? He is pretty hard to deceive, you know."

"No, not even Robin. _None_ of them know Good-night!"

But she was wrong.

CHAPTER NINE.

THE POLICY OF THE CLOSED DOOR.

Dilly's wedding took place the following summer, just before Parliament
rose, and the resources of our establishment were strained to the
uttermost to give her a fitting send-off.

It is true that a noble relative, the head of my wife's family, offered
his house for the reception, but Dilly emphatically declined to be
married from any but mine, saying prettily that she would not leave the
roof under which she had lived so happily until the last possible
moment.

Accordingly we made immense preparations. The drawing-room on the first
floor, accustomed though it was to accommodate congested and
half-stifled throngs of human beings, was deemed too small for the mob
of wedding-guests whom Kitty expected.

"You see, dear," sh