answered Orme, setting his mouth. "I have not answered, and I
am not going to answer it, either in writing or in person. I intend to
start to-morrow for Mur and to travel as far on that road as it pleases
fate to allow, and now I am going to look at the rock sculptures by the
cataract."

"Well, that's flat," said Higgs after he had departed, "and for my part
I am glad of it, for somehow I think he will be a useful man among those
Fung. Also, if he went I expect that the Sergeant would go too, and
where should we be without Quick, I should like to know?"

Afterwards I conversed with the said Quick about this same matter,
repeating to him my opinions, to which the Sergeant listened with the
deference which he was always kind enough to show to me.

"Begging your pardon, sir," he said, when I had finished, "but I think
you are both right and wrong. Everything has two ends, hasn't it? You
say that it would be wicked for the Captain to get himself killed, there
being now so much money for him to live for, seeing that life is common
as dirt while money is precious, rare and hard to come by. It ain't
the kings we admire, it's their crowns; it ain't the millionaires,
it's their millions; but, after all, the millionaires don't take their
millions with them, for Providence, that, like Nature, hates waste,
knows that if they did they'd melt, so one man dead gives another bread,
as the saying goes, or p'raps I should say gingerbread in such cases.

"Still, on the whole, sir, I admit you are right as to the sinfulness of
wasting luck. But now comes the other end. I know this young lady what
the Captain was engaged to, which he never would have been if he had
taken my advice, since of all the fish-blooded little serpents that ever
I set eyes on she's the serpentest, though pretty, I allow. Solomon said
in his haste that an honest woman he had not found, but if he had met
the Honourable Miss--well, never mind her name--he'd have said it at
his leisure, and gone on saying it. Now, no one should never take back
a servant what has given notice and then says he's sorry, for if he does
the sorrow will be on the other side before it's all done; and much less
should he take back a _fiancee_ (Quick said a 'finance'), on the whole,
he'd better drown himself--I tried it once, and I know. So that's the
tail of the business.

"But," he went on, "it has a couple of fins as well, like that eel beast
I caught in the Nile. One of them is that the