voice.

"Have you heard the news?" asked the man from the club. "Splendid."

"Splendid," replied the man by the well. But the first man
pronounced the word as a young man might say it about a woman, and
the second as an old man might say it about the weather, not without
sincerity, but certainly without fervor.

And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of
them. The first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and
boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native heat in his face that
did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather to the
ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was an older man and
certainly an older resident, a civilian official--Horne Fisher; and
his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the
paradox of the Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be
anything but cool.

Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was
splendid. That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about
something that everybody knew. The striking victory over a menacing
combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the
command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking victories,
was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone
to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.

"Now, no other nation in the world could have done a thing like
that," cried Captain Boyle, emphatically.

Horne Fisher was still looking silently into the well; a moment
later he answered: "We certainly have the art of unmaking mistakes.
That's where the poor old Prussians went wrong. They could only make
mistakes and stick to them. There is really a certain talent in
unmaking a mistake."

"What do you mean," asked Boyle, "what mistakes?"

"Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could
chew," replied Horne Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that
he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in
two million was ever allowed to hear of. "And it was certainly jolly
lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time. Odd how
often the right thing's been done for us by the second in command,
even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at
Waterloo."

"It ought to add a whole province to the Empire," observed the
other.

"Well, I suppose the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as
the canal," observed Fisher, thoughtfully, "though everybo