ipe, fell into a
train of thought.

The first thing was to stifle a strong inclination to reconsider
Suffield's proposal. It was not too late now. His pony was only
grazing on the town commonage hard by; he could have him brought in less
than half an hour. And then came the thought that the motive of this
was not the prospect of sport, and the conviction was an unwelcome one.
As we have said, he had already seen a good deal of Mona Ridsdale.
There was something about her that attracted him powerfully. What was
it? He was not in love with her; the bare idea that he might ever
become so stirred him uncomfortably. She was a splendid creature, a
physical paragon, but love! ah, that was another thing. Besides, what
had he to do with love, even were he capable of feeling it? That sort
of blissful delusion, veiling Dead Sea ashes, was all very well when one
was young; which he no longer was. His life was all behind him now,
which made it perhaps the more easy to start again almost where others
left off. The modest salary wherewith the Colonial Government saw fit
for the present to requite his services, did not constitute his sole
means of existence; he possessed something over and above it, though
little, and all combined gave him just enough to get along with a
moderate degree of comfort. And as his thoughts took this practical
turn, the association of ideas caused him to rise suddenly in disgust.
It was time to be doing something when his meditations landed him in
such a slough of grotesque idiocy, and with that intent he went straight
away to his office.

But times were easy just then. He wrote a couple of official letters,
and took down the deposition of a lanky Boer with a tallow countenance,
adorned by a wispy beard, who, amid much expectoration and nervous
shifting of his battered and greasy wide-awake from one hand to another,
delivered himself of a long and portentous complaint against a
neighbour, for rescuing by force certain cattle, which his servants were
driving to the nearest pound. Then, having satisfied this seeker of
redress, with the assurance that justice would overtake the footsteps of
the aggressor in the shape of a summons, and thus got rid of him, Roden
took down two or three of the office volumes and set to work to study a
little statute law, in which occupation he was presently disturbed by
the cheery, bustling step of Mr Van Stolz.

"Well, Musgrave, not much doing!" cried the latter,