Next came Eagle March, very slim and boyish in shape and size compared to Major Vandyke, though he can't be more than six years younger; and hardly had he time to greet his hostess and look wistfully at Di, when the Dalziels arrived, a party of four. I thought that the father and mother (a dear little, merry, round-faced couple, curiously like each other and like Billiken) looked too young and irresponsible to be parents of anything grown up; but perhaps they had married when they were almost children, for Lieutenant Dalziel, who was inches taller than his father, had the happy air of being twenty two or three, and Mrs. Main had said that the girl was "just out." Young Tony--nut-brown eyes, skin, and hair, clean shaven, smiling, with teeth white and even as kernels of American corn--was a glorified edition of his Billiken father. Miss Dalziel--Milly--was not a bit like any of the others, who had all been cut from the same pattern and painted with the same paint. She was even slimmer and smaller than I am; very fair, with a few freckles, and lots of blue veins at her temples. She had an obstinate pink button of a mouth; dimples, which she made come and go every minute by working the muscles of her cheeks; bright, fluffy red hair done high on her head, floating eyes of gray green, and blackened brows and lashes which, I suppose, had started life in red. She gave an effect of prettiness and of thinking herself prettier than she was, an opinion in which her dress-maker had backed her up. Tony Dalziel was jolly, and said so many quaint things in priceless slang that he kept me laughing; but I had eyes if not ears only for Di and Major Vandyke. "Say, he's rushing your sister, isn't he? Making a direct frontal attack--what?" remarked my neighbour, so it must have been conspicuous. One could see Major Vandyke consciously absorbing Diana, throwing over her head a veil of his own magnetism, as if to hide her in it from other men, and make her forget their existence. As for Di, she behaved perfectly, if she wished to fascinate and tantalize a flirt, such as Sidney Vandyke was said to be. She let herself seem to fall under his spell, and then suddenly slipped gently away, turning to Captain March who sat at her other side. She would talk to him in a friendly, intimate way, in a low voice, with little happy outbursts of laughter over their reminiscences of a year ago; then, half apologetically, she would turn back to Vandyke again, raising and letting fall her eyelashes in a way entirely her own, which, somehow, gives the effect of a blush. It was Victorian, or Edwardian at latest, but much more useful than any substitute girls have invented since. That night began the battle which was to have so strange a finish.