h languishing humour. "Now
you must please remember that I am quite young, and may have my head
turned, and--"

"It wouldn't alter my mind about you if you turned your head," he broke
in, gallantly, with a desperate attempt to take advantage of an
opportunity, and try his hand at a game entirely new to him.

There was an instant's pause, in which she looked at him with what was
half-assumed, half-natural shyness. His attempt to play with words was
so full of nature, and had behind it such apparent admiration, that the
unspoiled part of her was suddenly made self-conscious, however
agreeably so. Then she said to him: "I won't say you were brave last
night--that doesn't touch the situation. It wasn't bravery, of course;
it was splendid presence of mind which could only come to a man with
great decision of character. I don't think the newspapers put it at all
in the right way. It wasn't like saving a child from the top of a
burning building, was it?"

"There was nothing in it at all where I was concerned," he replied.
"I've been living a life for fifteen years where you had to move
quick--by instinct, as it were. There's no virtue in it. I was just a
little quicker than a thousand other men present, and I was nearer to
the stage."

"Not nearer than my father or Mr. Stafford."

"They had a bigger shock than I had, I suppose. They got struck numb
for a second. I'm a coarser kind. I have seen lots of sickening things;
and I suppose they don't stun me. We get callous, I fancy, we
veld-rangers and adventurers."

"You seem sensitive enough to fine emotions," she said, almost shyly.
"You were completely absorbed, carried away, by Al'mah's singing last
night. There wasn't a throb of music that escaped you, I should think."

"Well, that's primary instinct. Music is for the most savage natures.
The boor that couldn't appreciate the Taj Mahal, or the sculpture of
Michael Angelo, might be swept off his feet by the music of a master,
though he couldn't understand its story. Besides, I've carried a banjo
and a cornet to the ends of the earth with me. I saved my life with the
cornet once. A lion got inside my zareba in Rhodesia. I hadn't my gun
within reach, but I'd been playing the cornet, and just as he was
crouching I blew a blast from it--one of those jarring discords of
Wagner in the "Gotterdammerung"--and he turned tail and got away into
the bush with a howl. Hearing gets to be the most acute of all the
senses with the pio