ply stood and stared. The duke's
blue uniform, his wife's black-gowned figure, and the white, radiant
blur that was Miss Falconer revolved about me in spinning, starry
circles. I gasped, put out a hand, fortunately encountered Dunny's
shoulder, and, leaning heavily on that perplexed person, at last got
back my intelligence and my breath.

"Won't you shake hands with me, Mr. Bayne?" smiled the Duchess of
Raincy-la-Tour.

I was virtually sane again.

"I do hope," I said, "that you will forgive me. Not that I see the
slightest reason why you should, I am sure. Life is too short to wipe
out such a bad impression. I know how you'll remember me all your days;
as an idiot with a head done up in layers of toweling, wobbling on two
crutches and gaping at you like a fish."

But the duchess was still holding my hand in both of hers and smiling
up at me from a pair of great, dark, tender eyes, the loveliest pair
of eyes in the world, bar one. No, bar none, to be quite fair. The
Firefly's wife, most people would have said, was more beautiful than her
sister; but then, beauty is what pleases you, as some wise man remarked
long ago.

"I don't believe, Mr. Bayne," she was saying gently, "that I shall
ever remember you in any unpleasant way. You see, I know about those
bandages, and I know why you need those crutches. Even if you were vain,
you wouldn't mind the things I think of you--not at all."

I lack any clear recollection of the quarter of an hour that followed.
I know that we talked and laughed and were very friendly and very
cheerful, and that Dunny's eyes, as they studied me, began to hold
a gleam of intelligence, as if he were guessing something about the
reasons for my former black despondency. I recall that the duke's hand
was on my shoulder, and that--odd how one's attitude can change!--I
liked to feel it. We were going to be great friends, tremendous pals, I
suspected. And every time I looked at the duchess she seemed lovelier,
more gracious; she was the very wife I would have chosen for such a
corking chap.

This, however, was by the way. None of it really mattered. While I paid
compliments and supplied details as to my convalescence and answered
Dunny's chaffing, I saw only one member of the party, the girl in white.
She was rather silent; she gave me only fugitive glances. But she wasn't
engaged, at least not to the Firefly. Hurrah!

What an agonizing, heart-rending, utterly unnecessary experience I had
endur