your chance had come, but you seem to have thrown it
away again, somehow."

"My chance! My dear Mrs Van Stolz, what on earth `chance' are you
alluding to?"

"Oh, how very innocent we are!" she rejoined archly, while her husband
chuckled. "Well, it may not be true, but they say Miss Ridsdale and the
doctor take moonlight walks together."

This shaft, meant to be deadly, seemed to fly utterly wide. Roden, who
was engaged lighting his pipe at the moment, continued to do so with
unmoved countenance and hand as steady as a rock.

"And if it is true, I don't see what earthly business it is of mine," he
answered, in so perfectly equable a voice as to astonish his hearers.
"Really I have no more right to challenge Miss Ridsdale's acts than,
say, Lambert himself has."

"Perhaps he has by this time, Musgrave," struck in Mr Van Stolz
mischievously.

"In that event, still less can it be any business of mine," was the
perfectly good-humoured rejoinder. As a matter of fact, Roden disliked
this form of chaff; but he liked the utterers of it more than a little,
and knew that they meant it as nothing but sheer fun; moreover, he was
far too thorough a student of human nature to afford prominence to a
distasteful topic by appearing to shrink from it. Nor was his unconcern
in any degree forced. It was not in him to be jealous of Lambert, or
indeed, of anybody. Jealousy was a word which, done into a definition,
meant going begging to a given person for a consideration beyond what
that person felt--a despicable lowering of himself, towards which Roden
Musgrave felt no temptation. He rated himself at far too high a value
for that.

If Mona's apparently unaccountable conduct were of set design, if her
distant reserve were intended to draw him the more ardently to her feet,
to bind him more closely in her chains, if she were really making use of
the rather stale and transparent trick of playing off one against the
other, why then she was indulging in a very risky game. With nine men
out of ten that sort of thing might answer; with this one, never. He
was beginning to think of her with something of aversion, bordering on
contempt.

So the weeks went by and Christmas had come, but there was a sullen,
boding, uneasy feeling; for the restlessness of the border tribes had
been growing apace. Doppersdorp, however, managed to make merry, after
its kind, and got up rifle matches, and athletics, and balls, of a mixed
and republican