e. What shall I wear for dinner?"

"It's such a hard question," he demurred. "I like you best in so many
things, but the queen can do no wrong--make no mistake."

A sudden shadow of pain crossed her eyes, and she caught her lower lip
sharply between her teeth.

"Was it something I said?" he demanded.

"Nothing," she answered slowly. "Only don't say that again, ever--'the
queen can do no wrong.' Now, I must go."

She rose and turned toward the door, then suddenly carrying one hand to
her eyes, she took a single unsteady step and swayed as though she would
fall. Instantly his arms were around her and for a moment he could feel,
in its wild fluttering, her heart against the red breast of his
hunting-coat.

Her laugh was a little shaken as she drew away from him and stood,
still a trifle unsteady. Her voice was surcharged with self-contempt.

"Sir Gray Eyes, I--I ask you to believe that I don't habitually fall
about into people's arms. I'm developing nerves--there is a white
feather in my moral and mental plumage."

He looked at her with grave eyes, from which he sternly banished all
questioning--and remained silent.

They passed out into the hall and, at the foot of the stairs where their
ways diverged, she paused to look back at him with an unclouded smile.

"You have not told me what to wear."

His eyes were as steady as her own. "You will please wear the black gown
with the shimmery things all over it. I can't describe it, but I can
remember it. And a single red rose," he judiciously added.

"'Tis October and the florists are fifty miles away," she demurred. "It
would take a magician's wand to produce the red rose."

"I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks," he remembered.
"It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in
disguise. You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red
rose."

She threw back a laugh and was gone.

When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the
"bachelors' barracks," as the master of "Idle Times" dubbed the wing
where the unmarried men were quartered.

Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been
unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon. Between his quarters and
these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space.
Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the "neutral zone," as Van
called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or
connecting their ind