e Nilghai rolled in at mid-day for chess
and polite conversation.

'It's worse than anything I imagined,' said Torpenhow.

'Oh, the everlasting Dick, I suppose! You fuss over him like a hen with
one chick. Let him run riot if he thinks it'll amuse him. You can whip a
young pup off feather, but you can't whip a young man.'

'It isn't a woman. It's one woman; and it's a girl.'

'Where's your proof?'

'He got up and went out at eight this morning,--got up in the middle of
the night, by Jove! a thing he never does except when he's on service.

Even then, remember, we had to kick him out of his blankets before the
fight began at El-Maghrib. It's disgusting.'

'It looks odd; but maybe he's decided to buy a horse at last. He might
get up for that, mightn't he?'

'Buy a blazing wheelbarrow! He'd have told us if there was a horse in
the wind. It's a girl.'

'Don't be certain. Perhaps it's only a married woman.'

'Dick has some sense of humour, if you haven't. Who gets up in the gray
dawn to call on another man's wife? It's a girl.'

'Let it be a girl, then. She may teach him that there's somebody else in
the world besides himself.'

'She'll spoil his hand. She'll waste his time, and she'll marry him, and
ruin his work for ever. He'll be a respectable married man before we can
stop him, and--he'll ever go on the long trail again.'

'All quite possible, but the earth won't spin the other way when that
happens.... No! ho! I'd give something to see Dick "go wooing with the
boys." Don't worry about it. These things be with Allah, and we can only
look on. Get the chessmen.'

The red-haired girl was lying down in her own room, staring at the
ceiling. The footsteps of people on the pavement sounded, as they grew
indistinct in the distance, like a many-times-repeated kiss that was
all one long kiss. Her hands were by her side, and they opened and shut
savagely from time to time.

The charwoman in charge of the scrubbing of the studio knocked at her
door: 'Beg y' pardon, miss, but in cleanin' of a floor there's two,
not to say three, kind of soap, which is yaller, an' mottled, an'
disinfectink.

Now, jist before I took my pail into the passage I though it would be
pre'aps jest as well if I was to come up 'ere an' ask you what sort of
soap you was wishful that I should use on them boards. The yaller soap,
miss----'

There was nothing in the speech to have caused the paroxysm of fury
that drove the red-haired girl into