e Kid generally misses," chimed in Ailsa cheerfully. "He gets so
excited, he quivers all over, and the wild beast, or whatever it is,
just lollops away, throwing a grin over his shoulder at him."

"If you don't mind," threatened Stanley, "I'll give away your hippo
story."

"It has increased," said Ailsa's big, schoolboy husband, chuckling to
himself.

"Impossible!..." ejaculated The Kid. "Surely it had already reached
the limit of human ingenuity?"

They both spluttered, and Ailsa threw a newspaper at them, but Diana
demanded to be told the story.

"O, it's only about a hippo in the Zambesi, above the Victoria Falls,"
began Stanley; "a perfectly harmless hippo really, but it had the
impudence to look at the canoe in which Mrs. Grenville was travelling
back to the hotel in the dusk."

"I thought it bumped the canoe up and down on its back," said the
missionary, still chuckling.

"That came later"; and Stanley addressed himself gravely to Diana.
"But at one time the story really did stop at the hippo chasing them
on to an island and off it again, and opening and shutting its mouth
at them."

"If you had been there you would have been terrified, and had
hysterics or something," Ailsa flung at him.

"I certainly should at the later period of the story," he assured her.

"When it played catch-ball with them?" suggested the missionary.
"Threw them all into the air and caught them again in the canoe."

"That wasn't so bad, since it _did_ catch them," said Stanley. "My
horror would have been when it climbed the tree after them!..."

"That is the part that has increased," put in the schoolboy husband,
beginning to shake again. "It now jumps after them from one tree to
another," and then they both spluttered insanely, and Diana joined in
because it was so infectious, and Ailsa called them all ridiculous
children who ought to be given a sweetie and tucked up in bed.

A little later the cavalcade got under way, and Grenville and his wife
stood waving to them somewhat sorrowfully from their wilderness home.

"They are dear people," Ailsa said; and added, "O, Billy, if Major
Carew would but come out of his shell and love Meryl!... I am sure she
cares for him ... and she is so sweet ... and he--O, he is just like a
figure of stone."

Grenville pinched her ear affectionately. "Little matchmaker! No one
by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; and no one by just
wishing it, I am inclined to think, can influ