She had, indeed, good reason: eleven hours' sleep, with redundant happiness and bodily health as elastic as a child's, had made Amaryllis scarcely more delightful to her new friends' eyes than to her own. For on this Sunday morning she looked into her glass for the first time through a man's eyes.
In spite of her beauty, however, and of her joy in the man who was to see and praise it, there was yet in her heart a pricking as of conscience.
In the night there had come to her, for the first time since Dick had saved her from the Dutchwoman and her knife, the memory of Randal Bellamy; of his kindness, of his favour with her father and of his love for herself.
She did not now feel as she had felt in his study before she fell asleep; she did not even define the feeling which had then made her tears flow; and she understood, with the memory of Dick's kisses on her face, that Randal was not wounded as Dick would have been in losing her.
She had not wronged Randal, nor had she any sense of wrong-doing; for to love Dick was a natural thing to do—and a wise thing. It was even a praiseworthy deed: for that this wonderful Dick of all men should go without any smallest thing which he desired, would have been wicked indeed.
The sting was this: Randal did not yet know that she was Dick's, nor Dick that Randal would have had her his own. And she believed that it would hurt Randal less in the end to learn the tremendous news from her mouth than from her father's, Dick's or Lady Elizabeth's; and from Lady Elizabeth she knew she could not keep it long, having a suspicion, even, that she knew it already.
She must see Randal before Dick should come to her. She must tell Randal the most wonderful and most inevitable thing of that terrible and glorious yesterday. And Randal must decide whether Dick was to know what Randal had asked and offered. And if Dick was to know, Randal must decide by whom, and when.
If Randal wished it hidden, she could never tell it—not even to Dick.
For Amaryllis, even before she had "put her hair up," had learned to hate the woman who tries to hide her nakedness with a belt of scalps.
As these thoughts ran through her head, Amaryllis frowned between her eyebrows.