I tried a fresh line. "After the labours of to-day, I should have thought you would have been glad to go to bed," I said. "You imp!" And I laughed. There is something very disarming about the Twins' misdemeanours. We turned and walked upstairs together, and paused outside Dilly's door. "Good-night, Dilly," I said. "I admired your pluck." "It wasn't me," said Dilly, in a very small voice. "Not you?" "N-no. I said I would come, because Dicky said I daren't, and at the last moment I funked it. (Adrian, I simply couldn't!) So Dolly went instead." "Then that was Dolly all the time?" "Yes." "And she went, just to--to----" "To save my face. She's a brick," said Dilly. This, by the way, was the first occasion on which I realised the truth of Robin's dictum that Dilly and Dolly were girls of widely different character. "And didn't the others recognise her?" "No. That's the best of it!" "Not Dicky?" "No." "Not even Robin? He is pretty hard to deceive, you know." "No, not even Robin. _None_ of them know Good-night!" But she was wrong. CHAPTER NINE. THE POLICY OF THE CLOSED DOOR. Dilly's wedding took place the following summer, just before Parliament rose, and the resources of our establishment were strained to the uttermost to give her a fitting send-off. It is true that a noble relative, the head of my wife's family, offered his house for the reception, but Dilly emphatically declined to be married from any but mine, saying prettily that she would not leave the roof under which she had lived so happily until the last possible moment. Accordingly we made immense preparations. The drawing-room on the first floor, accustomed though it was to accommodate congested and half-stifled throngs of human beings, was deemed too small for the mob of wedding-guests whom Kitty expected. "You see, dear," she explained, "we can squash up _good_ people as much as we like, because their clothes don't matter; but women in wedding-frocks will be furious if they don't get enough elbow-room to show themselves." Accordingly a marquee was erected in the garden at the back of the house, opening into the dining-room through the French windows, and it was arranged that Dicky and Dilly were to take their stand in the middle of the same, what time the guests, having lubricated their utterance at the _buffet_ in the dining-room _en route_, filed past and delivered their congratulations. After that the company was to overflow into the garden, there to be moved by a concord of sweet sounds emanating from a band of assassins in pseudo-Hungarian uniforms. "And if it rains," concluded Kitty desperately, "they must have an overflow meeting in the basement--that's all!"