warning, he, incidentally, holding rank as Inspector in that useful
corps.

"Say what?"

"That they are always `talking through their necks.'"

"Wait till I do," she retorted, with a laugh, the fact being that she
was exceedingly popular with the police, rank and file, and had two
brothers in it. "Well, what about Ben Halse, and where had they seen
him?"

"At his own shop."

"Who were they?"

"I'm not sure. Meyrick, I think, was one."

"Well, if it's true it'll save you a journey, Mr Denham," she said.

"I'll hold on here for a day or two, then, and see. I'm in no violent
hurry."

He was inclined to do this in any case. There was a homelike
friendliness about these people among whom he had dropped only the night
before, which very much appealed to him. Eight or ten of them would
gather at table three times a day, and there was not one among them with
whom he had not some idea in common. Most of them, too, had been in the
country for years, and he had sat quite late into the previous night
listening to some of their experiences--experiences narrated with no
tom-fool idea of "cramming" a stranger, but, if anything, set in rather
too matter-of-fact a frame, at least so it had struck him. And in the
said capacity of stranger each and all had laid themselves out to show
him courtesy.

Breakfast over, the other boarders went off to their respective
avocations, and Denham, lighting a cigar, strolled outside. It was a
perfect morning. The sky was a vivid, unclouded blue, the sun, though
hot, was not oppressive, and there was just sufficient stirring of the
air to make against sultriness. At the back, dropping abruptly from the
compound itself, was the first of a series of densely forested kloofs,
whose tumbled masses of dark foliage seemed to roll like the irregular
waves of a sea, and beyond, just glimpsed through the golden haze, a
range of green, round-topped hills rose on the skyline. Immediately at
hand a non-indigenous profusion of trees and hedges, giving bosky shade
to the snug bungalows and official buildings which constituted the
township.

Denham, strolling leisurely up and down the broad, clean-swept garden
path flanked by its red lines of Jerusalem thorn, was inclined to think
that his lines had fallen in pleasant places. Over and above the beauty
of the surroundings and the exhilaration of the clear and ambient air
his naturalist soul had already begun to find interest in the unfamiliar