could have Petro's friendship and then drop it
like a hot chestnut didn't deserve him for a friend, much less a
lover. But there must have been some reason. It wouldn't have been
human nature, to put things on their lowest level, for a girl in Miss
Child's position to "turn down" a young man in Peter Rolls's for a
mere whim.

Could Ena have done something to put them apart? Eileen wondered. It
would--she had to admit--be like Ena. And if Ena had been treacherous
or hateful, then it would be a sort of poetical justice if she lost
Raygan through making her brother lose his dryad. Even now Eileen did
not know what Rags would do; and since their day at the Hands, he had
seemed somehow "off" the affair with Ena. But whatever happened in the
end--which, one way or the other, must come soon--between Ena and
Raygan, Peter mustn't lose the Lady in the Moon because of a stupid
promise exacted and made to get his sister out of some scrape.

Eileen wouldn't break the promise, because a promise was one of the
few things she and her brother Rags had never broken. Raygan wouldn't
release her, even if she begged him to do so, but there might be
another way--a way which might lead Petro straight to the Lady in the
Moon, if he were really in earnest about finding her. That was the
clever part of the inspiration which suddenly came to Eileen that same
night after starting up from a dream which was "endlessly quaint."

"I'll do it when I say good-bye to Mrs. Rolls," she told herself. And
the idea seemed to her so original, so filled with possibilities of
romance, that it was as soothing to the bruise in her heart as an
application of Peter Rolls's Balm of Gilead.

She guessed that he had put aside his reserve and told her about the
"dryad girl" because Ena had put him up to think that she--Eileen--had
"begun to care." The mortifying part was that it had been--almost
true. But Eileen wasn't going to mind. She was going to say to
herself, if ever the pain came back: "If I can do this for him,
surely, when he knows, he'll be glad he told me, and glad that I cared
enough to help."

It was only next morning, when the world showed its practical side,
that she realized how seldom in real life romances can be worked out
to a happy ending--or, at all events, the kind of happy ending the
people concerned are striving after.

"I'll do my best, though," she reiterated, "for Petro's sake and for
mine."

For her the lost dryad was but a shadow