"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 go out and see the sight. If there was anything worth the trouble of looking at, probably it could be seen from the hotel windows. "But what about _you_, Lady Peggy?" Tony asked. "I'd love to go with you," I answered. I put on a long cloak, the one I had worn to see "our" battery off at Fort Alvarado railway station, and Tony and I sallied forth together. It was not till we were safely in the street that he told me we were early for the procession. "Never mind," said I. "It's lovely to be out in the blue night. We'll just stroll through quiet streets, where there won't be a crowd to bother us, until it's time to go and gaze at the torches." "There's a nice little sort of park," he suggested, "not too far away. How would you like to walk there?" I said I would like it, and as our "little sort of" park wasn't the park whence the procession would start, we had it practically to ourselves. We found an empty seat and sat down side by side like a Tommy Atkins and his "girl" in Kensington Gardens. The first thing that Tony did when we were anchored together there was to propose again, after an apology. I let him get it over, and then played the next pawn in my game. CHAPTER XI