Presently Archie appeared. He was flushed. I thought he looked uncommonly well. He is a handsome beggar in his way. Dora received him with a something in her air which made his flush mount higher. I guessed how she set all his pulses tingling. Even Miss Whortleberry extended to him a welcome which, for her, was quite affectionate--he was a son of the Duke of Glenlivet. Dora went in with Innes, as being the biggest there. I came in with the tail. We would change all that! After dinner I made straight for the drawing-room. Something seemed to tell me that I had better make the running while I could. It was the pace which would win. Besides, the consciousness that I was once more in Dora's near neighbourhood had on me the same queer effect which it evidently had on Archie. I found her talking to the Whortleberry. Presently the millionairess went off with Mary Porteous. I had Dora to myself. It was odd how the recognition of this fact gave me what positively amounted to a thrill. And yet, for a moment or two, neither of us spoke. She sat opening and shutting her fan. I sat and watched her performance. And when I did speak at last, my voice actually trembled. "I have been thinking of what you said to me the other evening." "What was that?" "Have you forgotten?" "Haven't you?" "I could scarcely have been thinking of it if I had forgotten." "What did I say?" "You gave me courage." "Courage?" "Yes." "Were you in want of courage?" "Of that particular sort of courage. Some men only get that particular sort of courage from a woman. I know you gave it me." She glanced up with those strange eyes of hers. "Tell me what you mean." "It would take me an hour to explain. Don't you know?" "You never struck me as being in want of courage of any sort or kind." There was an ironic intonation in her voice, which, in some subtle fashion, recalled her father. "Is that meant as a reproach?" "No." She hesitated, as if to consider. Then went on, "It is not so much your courage which I should have questioned, as the direction in which it has been shown. It is a sufficiently rare quality to make it unfortunate that any of it should be wasted. How much of it has been wasted you know even better than I do." "I understand you. I thank you, not only for what you say, but also for what you leave unsaid. I am not only going to turn over a new leaf, Miss Jardine; I am going to commence a new volume. Though I shall always feel, myself, that you have commenced it for me." "I am content, so long as it is a volume of a certain kind." What did she mean? I seldom knew quite what she did mean. She puzzled me almost as much as her father. She was not like the average girl one bit. As she looked at me with her curiously smiling eyes, with the suggestion of strength which they conveyed to me, I felt that it was probable that she knew much more of the contents of my volume, the one which I claimed to be just closing, than I was likely to know of hers.