smiled quite frankly for him.

"Can't I tempt you to come also? I daren't promise you a decent
dinner, but I've some fresh Abdullah cigarettes out from home, if you
care to come down afterwards."

Diana was disarmed in spite of herself. "And will you promise to growl
very prettily?" with an arch expression.

"I'll try not to frighten you away too quickly."

Diana withdrew into the tent.

"O!" she said, "he's a bear with two faces; and that's the most
difficult to cope with of all."

XII

THE MISSION STATION

They went to the Grenvilles' the next day, while Mr. Pym took another
of his investigation trips. Stanley acted as escort, and Carew went to
Edwardstown on business.

Ailsa Grenville met them with her brightest smile, and ushered them
proudly into her cool, picturesque drawing-room hut.

"How charming!" they cried, with genuine delight; and Diana added, "O!
why can't I have a hut in the wilderness?..."

Then the khaki-clad, sportsmanlike missionary strode in, and after the
preliminary greetings Diana asked with charming piquancy, "O! are you
really and truly a missionary?"

"Really and truly," he told her gaily, and came over to her side of
the hut to sit beside her. "Why do you ask it like that?"

She considered a moment, and then declared impishly, "Because it
doesn't seem possible that a man like you should never say 'Damn.'"

He laughed outright. "Well, I'm not going to tell tales out of school;
but if you'd only got one pair of brown boots in the world and one
pair of brown gaiters, and the boy tried to clean them with blacklead
and paraffin oil!..."

Diana moved nearer to him, with her prettiest and most ingratiating
air. "O, tell me some more!... Tell me lots more."

"I don't think that is half so bad as the boy washing the saucepans
and the teacups all in the same water together," put in Mrs.
Grenville.

"How perfectly delicious of him!" cried Diana. "What else did he do?"

"You ought to have been here this morning when our stores came out
from Edwardstown," the missionary told her. "The boy carries them on
his head, you know; and there was a tin of golden syrup ..."

"Yes ... yes ... and it leaked!..." gleefully.

"Trickled all down his head and neck; you never saw such a sticky
mess! And as soon as the other boys discovered ..."

"Did they duck his head in a bucket?..."

"O, dear no!... _licked_ him!..."

Diana fairly howled with delight; and then Stanley came in, aft