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.
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