“Good-night, Sheila,” he said diffidently; and Sheila coming quickly toward him, put out her hand.  The note Amelia had handed her fell.  Dickie and Amelia both bent to pick it up.

“No, you don’t,” said Amelia, snatching it and accusing him, by her tone, of inexpressibly base intentions.  “Say, Miss Arundel,” in a whisper of thrilled confidence, “Mister Jim!  Uh?”

“Thank you, Dickie,” murmured Sheila, half-embarrassed, half-amused by her adoring follower’s innuendoes.  “Thank you for everything.  I shall have to think what I can do ...  Good-night.”

Dickie, his eyes forcibly held away from Jim’s note, murmured, “Good-night, ma’am,” and went out, closing the door with exaggerated gentleness.  The quietness of his departure seemed to spare Sheila’s sensitiveness.

“Ain’t he a worm, though!” exclaimed Amelia, sparing nobody’s sensitiveness.

“He’s nothing of the sort,” Sheila protested indignantly.  “He is a dear!”

Amelia opened her prominent eyes and pursed her lips.  A reassuring light dawned on her bewilderment.  “Oh, say, dearie, I wasn’t speakin’ of your Mister Jim.  I was makin’ reference to Dickie.”

Sheila thrust the note into her pocket and went over to the table to light her lamp.  “I know quite well that you meant Dickie,” she said.  “Nobody in Millings would ever dream of comparing Mr. James Greely to a worm, even if he came out from the ground just in time for the early bird to peck him.  I know that.”

“You’re ornery to-night, dearie,” announced Amelia, and with exemplary tact she creaked and breathed herself to the door.  There she had a relapse from tactfulness, however, and planted herself to stare.  “Ain’t you goin’ to read your note?”

Sheila, to be rid of her, unfolded the paper and read.  It was quite beautifully penned in green ink on violet paper.  Jim had written both wisely and too well.

“My darling—­Why not permit me to call you that when it is the simple and sincere truth?” An astonished little voice in Sheila’s brain here seemed to counter-question mechanically “Why not, indeed?”—­“I cannot think of anything but you and how I love you.  These little notes I am going to keep a-sending you are messengers of love.  You will never meet with a more tremendous lover than me....  Be my Queen,” Jim had written with a great climatic splash of ink, and he had signed himself, “Your James.”

Sheila’s face was crimson when she put down the note.  She stared straight in front of her for an instant with very large eyes in this scarlet rose of countenance and then she crumpled into mirth.  She put her face into her hands and rocked.  It seemed as though a giant of laughter had caught her about the ribs.

Amelia stared and felt a wound.  She swallowed a lump of balked sentiment as she went out.  Her idol was faintly tarnished, her heroine’s stature preceptibly diminished.  The sort of Madame du Barry atmosphere with which Sheila’s image was surrounded in Amelia’s fancy lost a little of its rosy glow.  The favorite of Kings, the amorita of Dukes, does not rock with laughter over scented notes from a High Desirable.