"The tears from your left eye come tumbling out over the edge of the well of your kindness for me," he said. "You would like me to have everything I want. But you know that Dick must have everything that you are. So there it is. But the tears out of your dear silly right eye are silly sham jewels, sparkling with dear injured vanity. You're afraid I shall somehow think you played a crooked little game with me. I don't."
The silly little handkerchief was getting the best of it.
"When you've quite turned that silly tap off," he went on, "I'll tell you something else."
He got up and walked away from her, looked at two prints which he did not see, lit a cigarette which he could not taste, and came back to a pale-faced, dry-eyed Amaryllis—a girl with a smile on her face that was a woman's smile.
"Tell me that other thing," she said.
"I don't suppose that it'll be altogether news to you, any more than yours was to me. But it's this: For a good long time I resisted you—just and only because the more I admired you, the more I couldn't help thinking that Dick ought to have his chance—what I knew was one of the great chances. Then I got weak, and last Wednesday I tried to grab mine, before he'd even had a look in. I felt mean—and I couldn't stop myself. That afternoon he came, and—well, as it turned out, saved me from the agonies of gout. I always get it, when I've done anything off colour."
"You!" said Amaryllis. "D'you know what he told me, the day we drove to Oxford?"
"Some silly yarn."
"A dear story, not a bit silly. He said he daren't admire a gun or a book or a horse of yours, for fear you'd force it on him. Said it was a mercy of Providence that your size and shape permitted him to admire your coats and trousers."
"Well," asked Randal, "doesn't he deserve the best of everything?"