o Co. A child, with a few hours
to think it over, could have seen the connection between my diving dress
and the loss of the _Ocean Pioneer_. A week after he left I went out
one morning and saw the _Motherhood_, the salver's ship from Starr
Race, towing up the channel and sounding. The whole blessed game was up,
and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy! How wild I felt! And guying it in
that stinking silly dress! Four months!"

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said, when
he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand pounds' worth
of gold."

"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.

"Oh yes! bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man inside
the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous ceremony. But
wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate scenes and explanations, and
long before he came I was out of it all--going home to Banya along the
coast, hiding in bushes by day, and thieving food from the villages by
night. Only weapon, a spear. No clothes, no money. Nothing. My face, my
fortune, as the saying is. And just a squeak of eight thousand pounds of
gold--fifth share. But the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because
they thought it was him had driven their luck away."

XXIV.

MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART.

Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind for a
month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her conversation that
quite a number of people who were not going to Rome, and who were not
likely to go to Rome, had made it a personal grievance against her. Some
indeed had attempted quite unavailingly to convince her that Rome was not
nearly such a desirable place as it was reported to be, and others had
gone so far as to suggest behind her back that she was dreadfully "stuck
up" about "that Rome of hers." And little Lily Hardhurst had told her
friend Mr. Binns that so far as she was concerned Miss Winchelsea might
"go to her old Rome and stop there; _she_ (Miss Lily Hardhurst)
wouldn't grieve." And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put herself upon
terms of personal tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto Cellini and Raphael
and Shelley and Keats--if she had been Shelley's widow she could not have
professed a keener interest in his grave--was a matter of universal
astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but
not too "touristy"'--Miss Winchelsea had a great dread of being
"to