AN UNEXPECTED VISIT

I don’t know what they thought of me, probably that I was crazy.  For a good minute, a long sixty seconds, I simply stood and stared.  The duke’s blue uniform, his wife’s black-gowned figure, and the white, radiant blur that was Miss Falconer revolved about me in spinning, starry circles.  I gasped, put out a hand, fortunately encountered Dunny’s shoulder, and, leaning heavily on that perplexed person, at last got back my intelligence and my breath.

“Won’t you shake hands with me, Mr. Bayne?” smiled the Duchess of Raincy-la-Tour.

I was virtually sane again.

“I do hope,” I said, “that you will forgive me.  Not that I see the slightest reason why you should, I am sure.  Life is too short to wipe out such a bad impression.  I know how you’ll remember me all your days; as an idiot with a head done up in layers of toweling, wobbling on two crutches and gaping at you like a fish.”

But the duchess was still holding my hand in both of hers and smiling up at me from a pair of great, dark, tender eyes, the loveliest pair of eyes in the world, bar one.  No, bar none, to be quite fair.  The Firefly’s wife, most people would have said, was more beautiful than her sister; but then, beauty is what pleases you, as some wise man remarked long ago.

“I don’t believe, Mr. Bayne,” she was saying gently, “that I shall ever remember you in any unpleasant way.  You see, I know about those bandages, and I know why you need those crutches.  Even if you were vain, you wouldn’t mind the things I think of you—­not at all.”

I lack any clear recollection of the quarter of an hour that followed.  I know that we talked and laughed and were very friendly and very cheerful, and that Dunny’s eyes, as they studied me, began to hold a gleam of intelligence, as if he were guessing something about the reasons for my former black despondency.  I recall that the duke’s hand was on my shoulder, and that—­odd how one’s attitude can change!—­I liked to feel it.  We were going to be great friends, tremendous pals, I suspected.  And every time I looked at the duchess she seemed lovelier, more gracious; she was the very wife I would have chosen for such a corking chap.

This, however, was by the way.  None of it really mattered.  While I paid compliments and supplied details as to my convalescence and answered Dunny’s chaffing, I saw only one member of the party, the girl in white.  She was rather silent; she gave me only fugitive glances.  But she wasn’t engaged, at least not to the Firefly.  Hurrah!

What an agonizing, heart-rending, utterly unnecessary experience I had endured, now that I thought of it!  I had jumped to conclusions with the agility of a kangaroo.  He had kissed her; she had allowed it.  Did that prove that he was her fiance?  He might have been anything—­her cousin or an old friend of her childhood, or her sister’s husband’s nephew.  But brother-in-law was best of all, not too remote or yet too close.  In that relationship, I decided, he was ideal.