u with the stamps, Mr Tasker," returned Mr
Van Stolz, "but we are not bound to lick them for you. Therefore, if
you want it done, you must do it yourself."

The agent stared, then looked foolish.

"Can I change these for a 2 pound one, then?" he growled, but quite
crestfallen.

"Well, you can this time; but we are not even bound to change them for
you, once they have been delivered. You can oblige Mr Tasker in this
way, Mr Musgrave."

"Certainly," said Roden blandly, and, the exchange being effected, the
agent departed.

"It would have served him right to have made him pay for another stamp,
Musgrave," chuckled the magistrate, when they were alone together. "But
the poor devil is generally so hard up that it's doubtful if he could
have mustered another 2 pounds."

Now the foregoing incidents were only two out of many; which went to
show that, if a man was unpopular in Doppersdorp, it was not necessarily
his own fault.

Still there were some, though few, by whom Roden was well liked. Among
these was Father O'Driscoll, the priest who shepherded the scanty and
scattered Catholic inhabitants of the town and district, a genial and
kindly-natured old man, and by reason of those qualities widely popular,
even with some of the surrounding Boers, whose traditional detestation
of the creed he represented it would be impossible to exaggerate. A
native of Cork, and in his younger days a keen sportsman, it was with
unbounded delight he discovered that the new official was well
acquainted with a considerable section of his own country and the
fishing streams thereof--and frequent were the evenings which these two
would spend together, over a steaming tumbler of punch, killing afresh
many a big salmon in Shannon, or Blackwater, or Lee. And with sparkling
eyes the old priest would disinter brown and weather-beaten fly-books,
turning over, almost reverently, the soiled parchment leaves, where
musty relics of the insidious gauds which had lured many a noble fish to
its undoing still hung together to carry back his mind to the far, far
past.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

LAMBERT--OUT OF IT.

"...And I can really give you no other answer."

"Don't say that, Mona. We haven't known each other so very long,
certainly, but still..."

"It isn't that, Dr Lambert. I like you very much, and all that sort of
thing, but I can say no more than I have said."

The two were alone together under the shade of the trees behind the
house: