to drink, and Rodd announced that he no longer feared
the necessity of operation upon Anscombe's leg. His recovery was
now a mere matter of time, and meanwhile he must not use his foot
or let the blood run into it more than could be helped, which
meant that he must keep himself in a recumbent position. The
trouble was that I had nothing on earth do except study the
characters of our hosts, which I found disagreeable and
depressing. I might have gone out shooting, but nothing of the
sort was allowed upon the property in obedience to the wish of
Miss Heda, a mysterious young person who was always expected and
never appeared, and beyond it I was afraid to travel for fear of
Basutos. I might have gone to Pilgrim's Rest or Lydenburg to
make report of the nefarious deeds of the said Basutos, but at
best it would have taken one or two days, and possibly I should
have been detained by officials who never consider any one's time
except their own.

This meant that I should have been obliged to leave Anscombe
alone, which I did not wish to do, so I just sat still and, as I
have said, was intensely bored, hanging about the place and
smoking more than was good for me.

In due course Anscombe emerged on to the stoep, where he lay with
his leg up, and was also bored, especially after he had tried to
pump old Marnham about his past in the Guards and completely
failed. It was in this mood of utter dejection that we agreed to
play a game of cards one evening. Not that either of us cared
for cards; indeed, personally, I have always detested them
because, with various-coloured counters to represent money which
never passed, they had formed one of the afflictions of my youth.

It was so annoying if you won, to be handed a number of green
counters and be informed that they represented so many hundreds
or thousands of pounds, or vice-versa if you lost, for as it cost
no one anything, my dear father insisted upon playing for
enormous stakes. Never in any aspect of life have I cared for
fooling. Anscombe also disliked cards, I think because his
ancestors too had played with counters, such as some that I have
seen belonging to the Cocoa-Tree Club and other gambling places
of a past generation, marked as high as a thousand guineas, which
counters must next morning be redeemed in hard cash, whereby his
family had been not a little impoverished.

"I fancy you will find they are high-fliers," he said when the
pair had left to fetch a