"It's such a hard question," he demurred. "I like you best in so many things, but the queen can do no wrong--make no mistake."
A sudden shadow of pain crossed her eyes, and she caught her lower lip sharply between her teeth.
"Nothing," she answered slowly. "Only don't say that again, ever--'the queen can do no wrong.' Now, I must go."
She rose and turned toward the door, then suddenly carrying one hand to her eyes, she took a single unsteady step and swayed as though she would fall. Instantly his arms were around her and for a moment he could feel, in its wild fluttering, her heart against the red breast of his hunting-coat.
Her laugh was a little shaken as she drew away from him and stood, still a trifle unsteady. Her voice was surcharged with self-contempt.
"Sir Gray Eyes, I--I ask you to believe that I don't habitually fall about into people's arms. I'm developing nerves--there is a white feather in my moral and mental plumage."
He looked at her with grave eyes, from which he sternly banished all questioning--and remained silent.
They passed out into the hall and, at the foot of the stairs where their ways diverged, she paused to look back at him with an unclouded smile.
His eyes were as steady as her own. "You will please wear the black gown with the shimmery things all over it. I can't describe it, but I can remember it. And a single red rose," he judiciously added.
"'Tis October and the florists are fifty miles away," she demurred. "It would take a magician's wand to produce the red rose."
"I noticed a funny looking thing among my golf sticks," he remembered. "It is a little bit like a niblick, but it may be a magic wand in disguise. You wear the black gown and trust to providence for the red rose."
When she disappeared at the turning, he wheeled and went to the "bachelors' barracks," as the master of "Idle Times" dubbed the wing where the unmarried men were quartered.
Two suites next adjoining the room allotted to Benton had been unoccupied when he had gone out that forenoon. Between his quarters and these erstwhile vacant ones lay a room forming a sort of buffer space. Here a sideboard, a card-table, and desk made the "neutral zone," as Van called it, available for his guests as a territory either separating or connecting their individual chambers.
