She was glad, though she was sad, too—­just a little sad.  It would pass, she knew, for she had not let herself go far.  In spite of all that Ena had said, it had never felt true that Peter cared for her.  She could have loved him, and been happy with him, and have made him happy, she thought, but since he didn’t want her, she must set herself to work hard not to want him.  She must take her mind off the little deep-down, bruised hurt in her heart by thinking of a way in which she could make him happy—­a way in which, by and by, he might recognize her handiwork and send her his thanks across the sea.

“I should like him to know I did it,” she said to herself.  “And then through all his life he would have to remember me because of his happiness, which, without me, he might have missed.”

Of course, Petro had mentioned no name, and Eileen had asked no questions.  If it had not been for Raygan’s revelation she might not have guessed; but now she did guess, and was almost sure.  It seemed to her that a girl who could have Petro’s friendship and then drop it like a hot chestnut didn’t deserve him for a friend, much less a lover.  But there must have been some reason.  It wouldn’t have been human nature, to put things on their lowest level, for a girl in Miss Child’s position to “turn down” a young man in Peter Rolls’s for a mere whim.

Could Ena have done something to put them apart?  Eileen wondered.  It would—­she had to admit—­be like Ena.  And if Ena had been treacherous or hateful, then it would be a sort of poetical justice if she lost Raygan through making her brother lose his dryad.  Even now Eileen did not know what Rags would do; and since their day at the Hands, he had seemed somehow “off” the affair with Ena.  But whatever happened in the end—­which, one way or the other, must come soon—­between Ena and Raygan, Peter mustn’t lose the Lady in the Moon because of a stupid promise exacted and made to get his sister out of some scrape.

Eileen wouldn’t break the promise, because a promise was one of the few things she and her brother Rags had never broken.  Raygan wouldn’t release her, even if she begged him to do so, but there might be another way—­a way which might lead Petro straight to the Lady in the Moon, if he were really in earnest about finding her.  That was the clever part of the inspiration which suddenly came to Eileen that same night after starting up from a dream which was “endlessly quaint.”

“I’ll do it when I say good-bye to Mrs. Rolls,” she told herself.  And the idea seemed to her so original, so filled with possibilities of romance, that it was as soothing to the bruise in her heart as an application of Peter Rolls’s Balm of Gilead.

She guessed that he had put aside his reserve and told her about the “dryad girl” because Ena had put him up to think that she—­Eileen—­had “begun to care.”  The mortifying part was that it had been—­almost true.  But Eileen wasn’t going to mind.  She was going to say to herself, if ever the pain came back:  “If I can do this for him, surely, when he knows, he’ll be glad he told me, and glad that I cared enough to help.”