em--that South
Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo,
smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets.
"Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that
you'd just stopped short at----"

"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If
you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind
me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on
my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"

"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to
the coffee-room window.

Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they
crack again.

"I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----"

"So were a lot of other young idiots."

"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."

"Of course, I"--Bingo's large face becomes very red--"I inferred nothing
in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I
ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."

"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in
rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.

"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"

"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in
speaking of the--the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was
very much in love. She had--kept house with a man I knew, before we came
together, and there may have been other affairs--for all I can tell, at
least--I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face
seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was
awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and
the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I--I lost my head."

"It's--it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.

There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's
verandah see the same vision--lime-lights of varying shades and colours
thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where
impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall
tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus
of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling
human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering
antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from