hip for the purpose of amusing my
fellow-creatures--not any--but with the object of being transported to
Cape Town with all possible despatch."

"Then you leave the ship at Cape Town? Are you, too, going on to
Johannesburg?"

"Not being dead, yes."

"Not being dead? Why, what in the world do you mean?"

"Oh, only that Holmes was asking after all his old friends one night in
the smoke-room, and all who were not dead had gone to Johannesburg.
Others I've heard talking the same way. So I've got into the habit of
thinking there are but two states--death and Johannesburg."

"Tell me, Mr. Stanninghame," said Lilith, struggling with a laugh, "are
you ever by any chance serious?"

"Oh, yes; I'm never anything else."

She hardly felt inclined to laugh now. There was a subtle something in
the tone--a something underlying the whimsicality of the words, that
seemed to quell her rising mirth. Again she glanced at his face, and
felt her interest deepen tenfold.

"We may meet again then," she said, her tone unconsciously softening; "I
am going to Johannesburg soon."

Meet again? Why, they had only just met; and what was it to him? Yet
still more was he conscious of a thrill as of latent witchery thrown
over him, as he lounged there in the warm luxuriousness of the tropical
noontide, with which this beautiful creature at his side, in her
careless attitude, all symmetry and grace, seemed so wholly in keeping.

"What a strange name that is of yours," he said, in the abrupt,
unthought-out way which was so characteristic of him.

She started slightly at its very abruptness, then smiled.

"Is it?" she said; "well, your own is not a very common one."

"No, it isn't; which is a bore at times, because people will persist in
spelling it wrong. It might have been worse, though. They went in for
giving us all more or less cloth-of-gold sort of names, though mine
smacks rather of the cloister than of the lists. One of my brothers they
dubbed Aylmer. He was in a regiment, and the mess would persist in
calling him Jack, for short. He resented it at first--afterwards came to
prefer it. Said it was more convenient. Well, it was."

"Mine is older than that. The very oldest feminine name on record," she
said, with just a spice of quiet mischief. "Lilith was Adam's first
wife."

If she thought the other was going to look foolish at hearing his own
words thus reproduced in such literal fashion, she never made a greater
mistake in her li