ured
within the very outskirts of the mealies thrown down. But no sooner had
the last grain disappeared than the worst instincts of the aggressive
bully were all to the fore again, and the huge biped, rearing himself up
to his full height, his jetty coat and snowy wing-feathers making a
brave show, challenged his benefactors forthwith, rolling his fiery eyes
as though longing to behold them in front of him with no protecting
fence between.

"Of all the ungracious, not to say ungrateful, scoundrels disfiguring
God's earth, I believe a cock ostrich is the very worst," remarked
Eustace. "He is, if possible, worse in that line than the British
loafer, for even the latter won't always open his Billingsgate upon you
until he has fairly assimilated the gin with which your ill-judged dole
`to save him from starving' has warmed his gullet. But this brute would
willingly kick you into smithereens, while you were in the very act of
feeding him."

Eanswyth laughed.

"What strange ideas you have got, Eustace. Now I wonder to how many
people any such notion as that would have occurred."

"Have I? I am often told so, so I suppose I must have. But the grand
majority of people never think themselves, consequently when they happen
upon anybody who does they gaze upon him with unmitigated astonishment
as a strange and startling product of some unknown state of existence."

"Thank you," retorted Eanswyth with a laugh. "That's a little hard on
me. As I made the remark, of course I am included in the grand majority
which doesn't think."

"I have a very great mind to treat that observation with the silence it
deserves. It is a ridiculous observation. Isn't it?"

"Perhaps it is," she acquiesced softly, in a tone that was half a sigh,
not so much on account of the actual burden of the conversation, as an
involuntary outburst of the dangerous, because too tender, undercurrent
of her thoughts. And of those two walking there side by side in the
radiant sunshine--outwardly so tranquilly, so peacefully, inwardly so
blissfully--it was hard to say which was the most fully alive to the
peril of the situation. Each was conscious of the mass of molten fires
raging within the thin eggshell crust; each was rigidly on guard; the
one with the feminine instinct of self-preservation superadded to the
sense of rectitude of a strong character; the other striving to rely
upon the necessity of caution and patience enjoined by a far-seeing and