over his nice
Billiken face, and I felt like every cat in Christendom rolled into one.
But it was the first move in my game. I hoped that after so much
encouragement, he would make some excuse after dinner to get me to
himself.

Scarcely a word was said during the meal concerning Captain March. Mrs.
Dalziel inquired about him; Tony with his mouth full answered
indistinctly and hurriedly that he was "getting along all right"--as
well as anybody could expect; and Milly viperishly turned the subject to
Major Vandyke's exploit.

"He'll be a greater popular hero now than Captain March ever was," she
remarked with an elaborately impersonal air. "The first thing we know,
Peggy, we shall hear that Lady Di is engaged to him; don't you think?
She adores heroes. She once told me so."

"What a romance that would be!" beamed nice Mrs. Dalziel, who never saw
under the surface of anything. But I was grateful to her for breaking
in, and saving me the necessity of an answer to Milly's questions. If I
had replied truthfully, I should have had to say that it was exactly
what I _did_ think. Whatever the secret of the night might turn out to
be, I felt sure that Sidney Vandyke had made a desperate bid to win
Diana away from Eagle March. And with pangs of sharp remorse I
remembered those angry words of mine which had perhaps spurred him to
the effort.

Neither Mrs. Dalziel nor Milly appeared to have any suspicions that the
origin of the night alarm was not precisely what the newspapers
reported; that simplified things for Tony, as far as they were
concerned; and I was careful not to fling at him a single embarrassing
question. As dinner went on he lost the worried look he had brought with
him, a look that was a misfit for his merry personality. He glanced
often with a rather pathetic wistfulness at me, which I read very easily
and shamefacedly; and at last he broke out with information concerning a
torchlight procession that would set forth from one of the parks of El
Paso. Of course I knew what this remark was leading up to! He'd heard
people say, he went on, that there was going to be quite a good
impromptu show, celebrating the end of the "scare"; for it was generally
felt that Major Vandyke's diplomatic dash had cleared the air of danger;
and if there had ever been any real peril it was past now, once and for
all. Would we like to go out and see the sight?

Promptly Milly answered for her mother and herself. They would not like
to