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