ad. "Besides we've got
most of the provisions," she pointed out. "And I want to get things
arranged a little before anyone comes."

They pressed on, therefore, past glades, obscure and gloomy, where the
flying-foxes hung in branches from the trees, and the little striped
squirrels leaped and scuttled from bough to bough, where the blue jays
laughed with abandoned mirth and the parroquets squabbled unceasingly,
and cunning monkey-faces peered forth, grimaced, and vanished.

"This place is full of critics," declared Noel. "Can't you feel the
nasty remarks they're making?"

Olga laughed and slightly shivered. "It isn't a very genial atmosphere,
is it? But I think we must be nearly there. Doesn't that look like a
break in the trees ahead?"

She was right. They were coming to a clearing in the jungle. Gradually
it opened before them. The trees gave place to shrubs, and the shrubs to
tall _kutcha_-grass which Olga viewed with deep suspicion.

"How easily a tiger could hide there!" she said.

Noel laughed aloud. "I daresay the brute's a myth, but in any case they
never come out in the day-time. Are you really nervous, or only
pretending?"

She was not pretending, but she did not tell him so. The _kutcha_-grass
was very thick, quite impenetrable. It stretched like a solid wall on
each side of them for a considerable distance--a choked wilderness of
coarse weed that grew higher than their heads.

"I say, what a charming spot!" said Noel. "Did Nick choose it for the
scenery, do you think, or the excellence of the road?"

They were bumping in and out of dusty holes with a violence that
threatened repeatedly to overturn them altogether.

Olga laughed rather hysterically. "I'm sure the champagne will be quite
unmanageable after all this shaking up. And just look what a lather your
horse is in!"

"It's a case of the wicked uncle and the lost babes over again,"
declared Noel. "It also smacks of _The Pilgrim's Progress_. Old Bunyan
would have made some good copy out of this. He'd have dubbed you
Mistress Timorous and me Master Overbold."

Olga laughed again more naturally. Noel could be very wholesome and
reassuring when he liked.

"And this beastly jungle-grass," he proceeded, "is the Wilderness of
Nasty Possibilities. Hold up, Tinker, my lad, and get out of it as fast
as you can!"

Tinker was obviously most anxious to comply. He bent all his sweating
energies to the task. The road--if such it could be called--bent i