“My dear, how could I have stopped him, with all St. George’s Channel between us?”

“Well, at any rate, you might persuade them all to have a little sense, and not treat me as if I was one of the elegant females in ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ who only refuse for fun!  Is not that enough to drive one frantic, Lucy?  Can’t you at least persuade the man himself?”

“Only one person can do that, Viola.”

“But I can’t!  That’s the horrid part of it.  I can’t get rid of it.  Mamma says I am a foolish child.  I could tell her of other people more foolish than I am.  I can see the difference between sham and reality, if they can’t.”

“I don’t think he means to be sham,” I rambled into defence of Eustace.

“Means it!  No, he hasn’t the sense.  I believe he really thinks it was he who saved Dermot’s life as entirely as mamma does.”

“No.  Now do they really?”

“Of course, as they do with everything.  It’s always ’The page slew the boar, the peer had the gloire.’”

“It’s the page’s own fault,” I said.  “He only wants the peer to have the gloire.”

“And very disagreeable and deceitful it is of him,” cried Viola; “only he hasn’t got a scrap of deceit in him, and that’s the reason he does it so naturally.  No, you may tell them that borrowed plumes won’t always serve, and there are things that can’t be done by deputy.”

And therewith Viola, perhaps perceiving what she had betrayed, turned more crimson than ever, and hid her face against me with a sob in her breath, and then I was quite sure of what I did not dare to express, further than by saying, while I caressed her, “I believe they honestly think it is all the same.”

“But it isn’t,” said Viola, recovering, and trying to talk and laugh off her confusion.  “I don’t think so, and poor Dermot did not find it so when the wrong one was left to lift him, and just ran his great stupid arm into the tenderest place in his side, and always stepped on all the boards that creak, and upset the table of physic bottles, and then said it was Harold’s way of propping them up!  And that’s the creature they expect me to believe in!”

We turned at the moment and saw a handkerchief beckoning to us from the window; and going in, found Dermot established on a couch under it, and Harold packing him up in rugs, a sight that amazed both of us; but Dermot said, “Yes, he treats me like Miss Stympson’s dog, you see.  Comes over by stealth when I want him.”

Dermot did look very ill and pain-worn, and his left arm lay useless across him, but there was a kind of light about his eyes that I had not seen for a long time, as he made Harold set a chair for me close to him, and he and Viola told the adventures of their journey, with mirth in their own style, and Harold stood leaning against the shutter with his look of perfect present content, as if basking in sunshine while it lasted.