dy, old chap. Been legging it around too much all the morning."

"Not I. I feel all right. You won't have to do doctor again, Sellon--
no fear," was the genial reply.

Now, Sellon's words had caused Marian to steal a very quick and anxious
glance at her companion's face, which at that moment was certainly
destitute of its normal healthy colour.

"Renshaw, you have been overdoing it," she said warningly. "You have
come here to be set up, not to be made ill again. So luckily it's just
dinnertime, and we must all go in."

So the parties fused, and, merged into one, retraced their steps towards
the house, chatting indifferently. But that glance of Marian's had
drawn, as it were, a curtain from before Violet's eyes. She, too,
thought she had made a discovery, and she, too, resolved to turn it to
future account--should the necessity arise.

"I say, Renshaw," said Selwood, _sotto voce_, and with a characteristic
nudge, as they entered the passage a little way behind the rest of the
party, "that chum of yours is a knowing dog, eh? Miss Avory has soon
managed to cure his headache. Ho--ho--ho!"

Thus did everybody combine to turn the steel, already sticking deep
enough, in this unfortunate man's heart.

Dinner over, the heat of the afternoon was got through in delightfully
easy and dawdling fashion. Christopher Selwood, in a big armchair, sat
in a cool corner absorbed in the ill-printed columns of the local sheet,
the _Fort Lamport Courier_, which set forth how _brandziekte_ had broken
out in one end of the district, and how a heavy hailstorm had peppered
the other, and how "our esteemed townsman, Ezekiel Bung, Esquire, the
genial landlord of the Flapdoodle Hotel," had, "we deeply regret to say,
fallen off the _stoep_ of his house and injured his leg," the fact being
that the said Bung, Esquire, had walked straight into space while as
drunk as a blind fiddler, and intent on kicking out a Fingo who had
contumaciously reckoned on quenching his thirst at the public bar,
instead of among his compatriots in the canteen. This and other news of
a like interesting and intellectual nature, Selwood scanned. Suddenly
an exclamation escaped him.

"By Jingo! This is good!" he cried. "I say, Marian, you remember those
two black chaps who were round here with all that stock two or three
weeks back? That one-eyed cuss who was inclined to be so cheeky?"

"Yes. What about them?"

"You remember the names on their pass?"