“—and they are going to club on a silver service for a wedding present. Isn’t that lovely?”
“Oh, yes, I suppose so,” Dick conceded. “But just think—if they should expect me to make a speech at the dinner! Good lord!”
Dora opened her clear, gray eyes wide:
“Why, Dick!” she remonstrated. “You don’t mean to tell me that you would show the white feather, just at the idea of making some response to a toast in your honor?”
“I never made a speech in my life,” the lover answered, shamefacedly; “and I am frightened nearly out of my wits at the bare idea of being called on.... But you spoke of the white feather, dearest. I never told you that my miserable enemy, Ormsby, sent me one.”
“What? He dared?” Dora sat erect, and her eyes flashed in a sudden wrath. “Tell me about it, Dick.”
The story was soon related, and the girl’s indignation against his whilom rival filled him with delight.
“The odd thing about it all was,” he went on, “that I carried that white feather with me. I had 355 a feeling, somehow, that it would serve as a talisman. And, perhaps, it did. Anyhow, I lived through the experience. One thing I know for a certainty. While my memory of the white feather lasted, I could never be a coward of the sort Ormsby meant.”
“Oh, Dick,” Dora cried, “have you the feather still?”
“Yes, indeed,” was the smiling answer. “You see, I got into the habit of keeping it by me.”