o mess or the club. However, I will
consult Rumzan, and we will have a regular parade of our materials,
and you shall inspect our resources. If there is anything in the way
of flower vases or center dishes, or anything of that sort, you think
requisite, we must get them. Jestonjee has got a good stock of all that
sort of thing. As to tablecloths and napkins and so on, I had a supply
with the china, so you will find that all right. Of course you will get
plenty of flowers; they are the principal things, after all, towards
making the table look well. You have had no experience in arranging
them, I suppose?"

"None at all, uncle; I never arranged a vase of flowers in my life."

"Then I tell you what you had better do, Isobel. You coax the Doctor
into coming in and undertaking it. He is famous in that way. He always
has the decoration of the mess table on grand occasions; and when we
give a dance the flowers and decorations are left to him as a matter of
course."

"I will ask him, uncle; but he is the last man in the world I should
have thought of in connection with flowers and decorations."

"He is a many sided man, my dear; he paints excellently, and has
wonderful taste in the way of dress. I can assure you that no lady in
the regiment is quite satisfied with a new costume until it has received
the stamp of the Doctor's approval. When we were stationed at Delhi four
years ago there was a fancy ball, and people who were judges of that
sort of thing said that they had never seen so pretty a collection of
dresses, and I should think fully half of them were manufactured from
the Doctor's sketches."

"I remember now," Isobel laughed, "that he was very sarcastic on board
ship as to the dresses of some of the people, but I thought it was only
his way of grumbling at things in general, though certainly I generally
agreed with him. He told me one day that my taste evidently inclined to
the dowdy, but you see I wore half mourning until I arrived out here."

The Doctor himself dropped in an hour later.

"I shall be glad, Doctor, if you will dine with us as often as you can
during the four days of the races," Major Hannay said. "Of course, I
shall be doing the hospitable to people who come in from out stations,
and as Isobel won't know any of them, it will be a little trying to
her, acting for the first time in the capacity of hostess. As you know
everybody, you will be able to make things go. I have got Hunter and his
wife a