oughing it,
Fielding thought, or better still, burning through it as through a crust
of lava; his eyes--eyes which listened, Fielding had not inaptly
described them--now spoke, and spoke vigorously; enthusiasm, too, rode on
his voice, deepening its tones--not enthusiasm of the febrile kind which
sends the speech wavering up and down the scale, but enthusiasm with
sobriety as its dominant note concentrated into a level flow of sound.
His description had all the freshness of an immediate occurrence.
Compared with the ordinary style of reminiscence it was the rose upon the
tree to the dried leaves of a _potpourri_.

'But,' said Fielding, unconsciously resisting the influence which Drake
exerted, 'I thought you took a whole army of blacks with you on these
expeditions?'

'Not on the one I speak of. In Matanga a small force of them, yes! But
even they were difficult to manage, and you could not depend upon them.
They would desert at the first opportunity, sell their guns, your
peace-offerings of brass rods, and whatever they could lay their hands
on, and straggle behind in the dusk until they got lost. It was no use
sending back for them in the morning. One would only have found their
bones, and their bones pretty well scoured too. I speak of them as a
class, of course. There were races loyal enough no doubt, the Zanzibari,
for instance. But the difficulty with them was to prevent them fighting
when there was no occasion. In fact the blacks who were loyal made up for
their loyalty by a lack of common-sense.'

'Cause and effect, I should be inclined to call the combination,'
remarked Fielding, 'with the lack of common-sense as the cause.'

Mrs. Willoughby looked her gratitude across the table, and again her lips
moved. Drake chanced to catch her eye, and in spite of herself she
rippled to a laugh. She had been defending herself by a repetition of the
editor's comment of "filibuster."

But at the same moment that Drake's glance met hers she had just waked up
to the humour of her conduct, and recognised it as a veritable child's
device. She could not but laugh, and, laughing there into the eyes of the
man, she lost her hostility to him. However, Mrs. Willoughby made an
effort to recover it.

'Well, I don't see,' she said to Drake, 'what right you have got to
marching into other people's countries even though they are black.'

'Ah!' Drake answered. 'That's precisely what I call, if I may say so, the
fireside point of vie