Dick matched her well.
With the cut cheek decently washed, the face shaved with Tom Brundage's worst razor, and a patch of flour congealing the blood of his wound, he looked very different from the ruffian who had disturbed, so short a while since, the lunch of the Brundage chickens. For his brown boots, brushed to the semblance of a shine, brown gaiters of the army cut, green cord riding-breeches which had delighted the heart of Tom Brundage until petrol prevailed over horseflesh and drove him into black; a striped waistcoat, of the old-fashioned waspish, horsey favour, partly buttoned over a grey army shirt and loosely covered by his own Norfolk jacket, with a knotted bandanna in place of collar, made of him an odd, but wholly credible nondescript of the lower sporting world.
Men on the roads of that joyous Saturday might have asked was it whippets, horses, or the ring which best explained this lank, keen-eyed, humorous-lipped, uneven-gaited fellow; but none would have suspected a masquerade in the figure offered to their eyes with an assurance so entirely devoid of self-consciousness.
Yet to Amaryllis it was perhaps the raffish green imitation-velours Homburg hat which did most to alter Dick Bellamy's aspect; so that she would wait for a glance of his eyes to assure herself that this was indeed her wonderful friend and champion, and no new man nor changed spirit.
But Pépe, its one honest and unpretentious person, had made the whole trio bizarre and incredible.
For though, on one word from Dick, Amaryllis had given her credence and trust to the Lizard, she yet felt that he suited so ill with any English surroundings that his incongruity would show up any boggled stitch in their two disguises. So, while she nibbled the biscuit which Dick had taken from the paper in his pocket and ordered her to eat, and listened to the unintelligible valedictory advice which Pépe was ladling out in Spanish, she was longing to be alone with the gentleman who looked so impossible, and free from the company of the man who the very pricking of her thumbs told her was a criminal, in spite of the modest bearing and the uplifted gaze at his idol.
Did she also adore her Limping Dick, as Pépe his Cojeante? Was the one worship antagonistic to the other? Why then—but Amaryllis, like many another woman, was so good a logician that she knew when to halt on the road to an awkward conclusion.
Pépe at last swept off his hat in profound obeisance to "la señorita roja," took Dick's hand with reverence and his generous wad of notes without shame, and hurried back on his road to "The Myrtles."
She looked at Dick's face as his eyes followed the Lizard, and read in it an expression so strange and so mixed, that she turned again to take her own last sight of the man she was glad to be rid of.
Pépe had vanished utterly.