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over-respectful and out of fashion. He called her I Madam' once.
He seemed a person of means and leisure, but he knew nothing of

recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he spend his time?
He was certainly chivalrous, and a trifle simpleminded. She

fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had
never met with such a man before. What COULD he be?

"Mr. Benson," she said, breaking a silence devoted to landscape.
He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles.

"At your service."
"Do you paint? Are you an artist?"

"Well." Judicious pause. "I should hardly call myself a Nartist."
you know. I DO paint a little. And sketch, you know--skitty kind

of things."
He plucked and began to nibble a blade of grass. It was really

not so much lying as his quick imagination that prompted him to
add, "In Papers, you know, and all that."

"I see," said Jessie, looking at him thoughtfully. Artists were a
very heterogeneous class certainly, and geniuses had a trick of

being a little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. "I
don't do MUCH, you know."

"It's not your profession?
"Oh, no," said Hoopdriver, anxious now to hedge. "I don't make a

regular thing of it, you know. jest now and then something comes
into my head and down it goes. No--I'm not a regular artist."

"Then you don't practise any regular profession? Mr. Hoopdriver
looked into her eyes and saw their quiet unsuspicious regard. He

had vague ideas of resuming the detective role. "It's like this,"
he said, to gain time. "I have a sort of profession. Only there's

a kind of reason--nothing much, you know "
"I beg your pardon for cross-examining you."

"No trouble," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "Only I can't very well--I
leave it to you, you know. I don't want to make any mystery of

it, so far as that goes." Should he plungeboldly and be a
barrister? That anyhow was something pretty good. But she might

know about barristry.
"I think I could guess what you are."

"Well--guess," said Mr. Hoopdriver.
"You come from one of the colonies?"

"Dear me!" said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind.
"How did you find out THAT?" (the man was born in a London

suburb, dear Reader.)
"I guessed," she said.

He lifted his eyebrows as one astonished, and clutched a new
piece of grass.

"You were educated up country."
"Good again," said Hoopdriver, rolling over again into her elbow.

"You're a CLAIRVOY ant." He bit at the grass, smiling. "Which
colony was it?"

"That I don't know."
"You must guess," said Hoopdriver.

"South Africa," she said. "I stronglyincline to South Africa."
"South Africa's quite a large place," he said.

"But South Africa is right?"
"You're warm," said Hoopdriver, "anyhow," and the while his

imagination was eagerly exploring this new province.
"South Africa IS right?" she insisted.

He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her
eyes.

"What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive
Schreiner's, you know--The Story of an African Farm.' Gregory

Rose is so like you."
"I never read 'The Story of an African Farm,'" said Hoopdriver.

"I must. What's he like?"
"You must read the book. But it's a wonderful place, with its

mixture of races, and its brand-new civilisation jostling the old
savagery. Were you near Khama?"

"He was a long way off from our place," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "We
had a little ostrich farm, you know--Just a few hundred of 'em,

out Johannesburg way."
"On the Karroo--was it called?"

"That's the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got
along very well in the old days.--But there's no ostriches on

that farm now." He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the
moment, but he stopped and left a little to the girl's

imagination. Besides which it had occurred to him with a kind of
shock that he was lying.

"What became of the ostriches?"
"We sold 'em off, when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I

have another cigarette? That was when I was quite a little chap,
you know, that we had this ostrich farm."

"Did you have Blacks and Boers about you?"
"Lots," said Mr. Hoopdriver, striking a match on his instep and

beginning to feel hot at the new responsibility he had brought
upon himself.

"How interesting! Do you know, I've never been out of England
except to Paris and Mentone and Switzerland."

"One gets tired of travelling (puff) after a bit, of course."
"You must tell me about your farm in South Africa. It always

stimulates my imagination to think of these places. I can fancy
all the tall ostriches being driven out by a black herd--to

graze, I suppose. How do ostriches feed?"
"Well," said Hoopdriver. "That's rather various. They have their

fancies, you know. There's fruit, of course, and that kind of
thing. And chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment."

"Did you ever see a lion?" "They weren't very common in our
district," said Hoopdriver, quite modestly. "But I've seen them,

of course. Once or twice."
"Fancy seeing a lion! Weren't you frightened?"

Mr. Hoopdriver was now thoroughly sorry he had accepted that
offer of South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the

Solent languidly as he settled the fate on that lion in his mind.
"I scarcely had time," he said. "It all happened in a minute."

"Go on," she said.
"I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted ostriches

were."
"Did you EAT ostriches, then? I did not know--"

"Eat them!--often. Very nice they ARE too, properly stuffed.
Well, we--I, rather--was going across this paddock, and I saw

something standing up in the moonlight and looking at me." Mr.
Hoopdriver was in a hot perspiration now. His invention seemed to

have gone limp. "Luckily I had my father's gun with me. I was
scared, though, I can tell you. (Puff.) I just aimed at the end

that I thought was the head. And let fly. (Puff.) And over it
went, you know."

"Dead?"
"AS dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired. And I

wasn't much over nine at the time, neither."
"_I_ should have screamed and run away."

"There's some things you can't run away from," said Mr.
Hoopdriver. "To run would have been Death."

"I don't think I ever met a lion-killer before," she remarked,
evidently with a heightened opinion of him.

There was a pause. She seemed meditating further questions. Mr.
Hoopdriver drew his watch hastily. "I say," said Mr. Hoopdriver,

showing it to her, "don't you think we ought to be getting on?"
His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his

confusion to modesty. He rose with a lion added to the burthens
of his conscience, and held out his hand to assist her. They

walked down into Cosham again, resumed their machines, and went
on at a leisurely pace along the northern shore of the big

harbour. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no longer happy. This horrible,
this fulsome lie, stuck in his memory. Why HAD he done it? She

did not ask for any more South African stories, happily--at least
until Porchester was reached--but talked instead of Living One's

Own Life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She talked
wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver's mind fermenting. By the Castle,

Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in little shore pools. At
Fareham they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards

the hour of sunset, under such invigorating circumstances as you
shall in due course hear.

THE RESCUE EXPEDITION
XXX

And now to tell of those energetic chevaliers, Widgery, Dangle,
and Phipps, and of that distressed beauty, 'Thomas Plantagenet,'

well known in society, so the paragraphs said, as Mrs. Milton. We
left them at Midhurst station, if I remember rightly, waiting, in

a state of fine emotion, for the Chichester train. It was clearly
understood by the entire Rescue Party that Mrs. Milton was

bearing up bravely against almost overwhelming grief. The three
gentlemen outdid one another in sympathetic expedients; they

watched her gravely almost tenderly. The substantial Widgery
tugged at his moustache, and looked his unspeakable feelings at

her with those dog-like, brown eyes of his; the slender Dangle
tugged at HIS moustache, and did what he could with unsympathetic

grey ones. Phipps, unhappily, had no moustache to run any risks
with, so he folded his arms and talked in a brave, indifferent,

bearing-up tone about the London, Brighton, and South Coast
Railway, just to cheer the poor woman up a little. And even Mrs.

Milton really felt that exalted melancholy to the very bottom of
her heart, and tried to show it in a dozen little, delicate,

feminine ways.
"There is nothing to do until we get to Chichester," said Dangle.

"Nothing."
"Nothing," said Widgery, and aside in her ear: "You really ate

scarcely anything, you know."
"Their trains are always late," said Phipps, with his fingers

along the edge of his collar. Dangle, you must understand, was a
sub-editor and reviewer, and his pride was to be Thomas

Plantagenet's intellectualcompanion. Widgery, the big man, was
manager of a bank and a mighty golfer, and his conception of his

relations to her never came into his mind without those charming
oldlines, "Douglas, Douglas, tender and true," falling hard upon

its heels. His name was Douglas-Douglas Widgery. And Phipps,
Phipps was a medical student still, and he felt that he laid his

heart at her feet, the heart of a man of the world. She was kind
to them all in her way, and insisted on their being friends

together, in spite of a disposition to reciprocal criticism they
displayed. Dangle thought Widgery a Philistine, appreciating but

coarsely the merits of "A Soul Untrammelled," and Widgery thought
Dangle lacked, humanity--would talk insincerely to say a clever

thing. Both Dangle and Widgery thought Phipps a bit of a cub, and
Phipps thought both Dangle and Widgery a couple of Thundering

Bounders.
"They would have got to Chichester in time for lunch," said

Dangle, in the train. "After, perhaps. And there's no sufficient
place in the road. So soon as we get there, Phipps must inquire

at the chief hotels to see if any one answering to her
description has lunched there."

"Oh, I'LL inquire," said Phipps. "Willingly. I suppose you and
Widgery will just hang about--"

He saw an expression of pain on Mrs. Milton's gentle face, and
stopped abruptly.

"No," said Dangle, "we shan't HANG ABOUT, as you put it. There
are two places in Chichester where tourists might go--the

cathedral and a remarkably fine museum. I shall go to the
cathedral and make an inquiry or so, while Widgery--"

"The museum. Very well. And after that there's a little thing or
two I've thought of myself," said Widgery.

To begin with they took Mrs. Milton in a kind of procession to
the Red Hotel and established her there with some tea. "You are

so kind to me," she said. "All of you." They signified that it


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