though he had just invented gunpowder. Mrs. Campbell
began as usual to talk baby language, and play a kind of Dumb Crambo at
him. He never seemed able to guess the word.

"I hope we haven't interrupted you in your studies," said Val politely.

"She say she ope she not interrupt. Work, you know. Oeuvre--Arbeit."

"I was just amusing myself with the very witty paper from Germany,
_Kladderadatsch_. It is very funny," he said.

"It sounds funny," said Val sympathetically.

"What I find in England is that you're all wonderfully serious,
wonderfully courteous, wonderfully kind"--he bowed to his hostess; "but,
you'll excuse my saying so, I don't find enough wit or lightness for my
temperament. For humour I have to go to Belgium or Germany."

He spoke with intense solemnity.

Mrs. Campbell now began to translate him even to himself.

"You say you like fun, wit--just fun to make laugh?" She made strange
signs with her fingers.

He did not appear to understand the code. He stared at her with a frown,
and rasped on seriously--

"I find a few comical jokes occasionally a great relief after my heavy
work. It is very deep work."

"I suppose it would be indiscreet to ask what the invention is?" said
Valentia, smiling.

"Not at all. There is nothing indiscreet whatever in your curiosity,
Mrs. Wyburn."

He took a scone covered with butter and swallowed it in an
extraordinarily short time, and in an ingenious manner.

"No, there's no indiscretion in the matter at all. Do not trouble
yourself on that score. It is merely the natural interest that a
cultivated and intellectual English lady would naturally take when she
hears of an extraordinary invention from another country." He bowed, and
having thus explained her to herself, he then ate another scone.

"She say she want to know, you know," nodded Mrs. Campbell, putting up a
playful and threatening finger with dignified coquetry and a stony
smile. (She was subject to fits of this kind of marble archness
unexpectedly.)

"Yes. So I understood."

The Belgian was looking at Daphne with distinct admiration. Of course
Miss Campbell came and sat down beside him. Women always follow their
instinct to come and sit on the other side of any man whom they regard
as their property. They seem to think that merely by sitting on the
other side they protect him from freebooters. As a matter of fact, it
would be more sensible, if to distract his attention were the object, to
sit oppos