l you the lion that will
not roar."

"Am I horribly loquacious?" The hero smiled, but was not more silent. He
had great things to tell, and he told them well and modestly. Lady
Agatha sat with her cheek shaded by a peacock-feather fan. There was a
deep glow in her eyes. Glancing across at her from the opposite corner,
Mary thought it must be the reflection of the firelight.

She came to Mary's room after the guests had departed, when Mary was
preparing for bed, and sat down in the chair by the open window.

"What do you think of him, Mary?" she asked.

"Of whom?" Mary said sleepily. They had met a good many people during
the day, so the question was a pardonable one.

"Of whom! Why, of Mr. Jardine! Who else could it be?"

She lifted her arms about her head, and the loose white sleeves of her
gown fell away from their roundness and softness.

"What a man!" she said, with a long sigh. "What a man! That is life, if
you like. How tame the others seem beside him!"

"He roared very gently," said Mary, "but it was very exciting."

"Yes, wasn't it? That sail in the canoe down the river, with the jungle
on each side of them alive with wild beasts and venomous reptiles, to
say nothing of cannibals, and deadly sicknesses worse than any of those.
He said so little about the danger. One got an impression of the
extraordinary languorous beauty of the tropical vegetation; one smelt
it, that African night, with its enormous moon beyond the mists. There
was death on every side of him, in every breath he drew. He found what
he went for, the antidote to the bite of the death's-head spider.
Henceforth life in those latitudes will be robbed of one of its terrors.
What a man!"

"It is a pity that we could not have heard him at the Royal Society,"
Mary said, with a little yawn--they had been keeping late hours. "If it
had been a day or two earlier!"

"But I am going," said Lady Agatha. "Why, Mary, it is only to alter our
arrangements by a day. Hazels--the dear place--will keep for a day
longer."

CHAPTER XII

HER LADYSHIP

At Hazels Mary found her duties more onerous than they had been in town.
It was delightful to see Lady Agatha among her own people. She had made
life easier for them. Mary marvelled at the prettiness of the red-brick
farmhouses, with roses and honeysuckle to their eaves. She could never
get over the feeling that it was only a picture. They would walk or
drive to them, and the farmer's wife would co