"You make me out heaps worse than I am," she reproached me. "If I haven't given an absolutely definite answer to Eagle March or Sidney Vandyke, it's—it's—because of this expedition they're both going on. They may get some chance to distinguish themselves. You're such a practical little person that you can't realize the romantic sort of feeling I have about such things. If I marry a man who isn't of my own country, I should like him to be a great hero, whom every one would read about and admire. I've told each of them to work, and do his best for my sake."
"There'll probably be no opportunity for anything heroic in such an expedition as this," said I, living up to the reputation—ill-deserved—for practicality, which Di wished to thrust on me in contrast with herself.
"That's what they both said," she agreed, "but one never knows."
"And so you get a story-book-heroine excuse to wait!"
"Little viper!"
"The cat-pig-viper won't sting unless you force it to," I guaranteed. "There! Your dress is all right again."
"You could have finished five minutes ago, if you hadn't been determined to lecture me. Thanks, all the same. You have your uses, though they're not always sweet, like those of adversity."
We went our separate ways with the men who were waiting to take us in to supper; and we didn't come together again till the dance was over, and every one but the party specially asked to stay had gone home. We heard the bugles sounding reveille; then presently the beat of drums and the rumble of the field guns going to the station. When Captain Kilburn announced that the entrainment was well under way, we started in his big limousine, shivering a little in evening cloaks flung on hastily over low-necked dresses. We waited till the platform was clear of the great mass of khaki-clad young men, and then timidly appeared, to stare through the dusk of early morning in search of friends. Ours wasn't the only party engaged in that business. Others were there; and swathed figures of girls and women, in rich-coloured cloaks over pale-tinted ball gowns, glimmered in the dawn like a row of tall flowers crowding along the edge of a garden path. My eyes were trying to find Eagle March when Tony Dalziel spoke by my shoulder, and made me jump. "I've just a minute," he said when I turned. "I want to ask you if you'll forget you turned me down last night, and be friends again. I will if you will. Will you?"
"Yes," I returned gladly, shaking hands. "I'm so glad you've realized that you were silly to feel about me like that. Why you or any man should, I can't think!"
"Can't you? That's because you haven't seen yourself, or heard yourself, and don't know what a quaint, darling sort of girl you are. But never mind. Let it go at that. We'll be friends. And promise, if my mother and Milly ask you to do something for them, you will."