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him what we want. Is that all right with you?'
    That time she couldn't even bring herself to say 'yes.'
    She nodded her head and made a dash past him into the house, pretending that she had thought of something urgent to do upstairs in her room. It was all the more ridiculous, therefore, to hide behind the banisters and watch his departure. He couldn't have known she was there, because she and Betsy had experimented several times at hiding there in the past, but it was strange the way he smiled right up at her, looking right at the place where she was, just as if he did know and was amused by her fright.
    As a matter of fact, she thought him decidedly good-looking as he went out the front door. She was conscious of the muscular sweep of his back and his shoulders as he replaced that terrible hat before going out into the sun. Heaven help her, but it wouldn't do if she were to start to find him handsome! But he did have a rather attractive, distinctly masculine quality, if one liked that sort of thing. It was that something that had made Betsy refer to him as being 'simply super', Hero supposed, and there was no doubt that Betsy knew about things like that. Had Betsy taken him out for one of her romantic interludes before she had decided to turn him over to Hero? It was hard to imagine Benedict submitting meekly to being used like that, but then where Betsy was concerned, men had submitted to very much more than that!
    Perhaps it was the thought of having to compete with Betsy's cool good looks that gave Hero the idea that she would wear her mother's wedding dress to her own wedding. She forgot for the moment all she had had to say about the ceremony being a farce and that she would wear what she always wore for the occasion. All she remembered was Benedict asking her to wear white for him, and she found she was eager to oblige him. She did have in her wardrobe a white dress, but its severely tailored look would hardly have appealed to him. No, when it came to pleasing Benedict, the more frills and furbelows the better!
    Her mother had made her wedding dress with her own hands, embroidering the veil with Greek love-knots, like so many links in a chain of eternity. Hero wondered briefly if it was suitable when she and Benedict were destined to part almost immediately, but she smothered down her doubts, thinking only of the way he would see her, dressed like an old-fashioned romantic dream, and that it would help to counteract his first impression of her, as adventuress and cheat.
    By nine o'clock she was fully dressed and ready.
    'Don't you dare sit down!' Betsy's mother threatened her. 'You'll crease your skirt, and I won't have it.' 'What am I to do?'
    'Anything you like as long as you stand still and don't breathe. I'm determined you shall look as nice as your
    parents would have wished. Your mother was a friend of
    • /
    mine —
    'I know,' Hero said quickly. 'You've been so good to me this last year. I'll never be able to thank you sufficiently.'
    'You do, my dear, by being a friend of Betsy. I'm worried about her. I wish she had some of your stability
    - but there, it's no use wishing for the moon !'
    Hero smiled wryly. Marrying a man she didn't know, and didn't love, just because he was British and could transfer to her that magic nationality, was not what she would have described as stable behaviour!
    'If we're walking, perhaps Betsy and I could leave
    early? I want to show them my dress in the book shop —'
    'Hero, really !'
    'May I?' Hero persisted.
    Betsy's mother broke into good-natured laughter. 'If you must, dear. I'll tell Betsy to hurry up.'
    The jacaranda was fully out as the two girls walked along Kenyatta Avenue, Hero carefully holding up her dress out of the dust. The sun glinted through the mauve blossom, lighting the purples, reds, and salmon pinks of the bougainvillea by the side of the road. It was the prettiest day imaginable; sparkling, not too hot, and with a champagne quality that the altitude often