start her car. And the same dignity might
have attended her entire departure, but in the excitement she
apparently flooded her carbureter, and the starter refused to work,
and she pushed and spun and re-throttled and pushed until she was
quite red in the face. And when the car finally did get under way, the
running-gear became slightly involved with my broken wash-tub and it
was not until the latter was completely and ruthlessly demolished that
the automobile found its right-of-way undisputed and anything like
dignity returned to the situation.

I stood there, with the long-handled preserving spoon still in my
hand, staring after Lady Alicia and the dust that arose from her
car-wheels. I stood there in a sort of trance, with all the valor gone
out of my bones and that foolish declamation of mine still ringing in
my ears.

I began to think of all the clever things I might have said to Lady
Alicia Elizabeth Newland. But the more I thought it over the more
desolated I became in spirit, so that by the time I meandered back to
the shack I had a face as long as a fiddle. And there I was confronted
by a bristling and voluble Struthers, who acknowledged that she'd
heard what she'd heard, and could no longer keep her lips sealed,
whether it was her place to speak or not, and that her ladyship was
not all that she ought to be, not by any manner of means, or she would
never have left England and hidden herself away in this wilderness of
a colony.

I had been rather preoccupied with my own thoughts, and paying scant
attention to the clattering-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But
the intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for the sake of her
health brought me up short. And Struthers, when I challenged that
statement, promptly announced that the lady in question was no more in
search of health than a tom-cat's in search of water and no more
interested in ranching than an ox is interested in astronomy, seeing
as she'd 'a' been co-respondent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller
divorce case if she'd stayed where the law could have laid a hand on
her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron Crewe-Buller shut
himself up in his shooting-lodge and blew his brains out three weeks
before her ladyship had sailed for America, and the papers that full
of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respecting lady's maid
to meet her friends of a morning in Finsbury Park. And as for these
newer goings-on, Struthers had seen wh