an say, "We
have had a bishop in our schoolroom, but we would much rather have an
explorer," but by the time they had crossed the lawn he was sleeping
peacefully.

If he had known it, it was hardly the time for him to sleep.

"If you're ill, go to bed; if not, behave as usual," was a Clinton maxim
which accounted for Cicely's appearance at the tea-table an hour later,
when she would much rather have remained in her own room. The effort, no
small one, of walking across the lawn in full view of the company
assembled round the tea-table, as if nothing had happened to her within
the last hour, braced her nerves. She was a shade paler than ordinary,
but otherwise there was nothing in her appearance to arouse comment.
Mackenzie sprang up from his chair as she approached and went forward to
meet her. "I tried to find you directly I came, Miss Clinton," he said
in his loud voice, which no course of civilisation would avail to
subdue. "I've brought those sketches I told you about last night."

Cicely breathed relief. She had not been told the pretext upon which he
had started off in pursuit of her immediately upon his arrival, and had
had terrifying visions of a reception marked by anxious and inquiring
looks. But Jim greeted her with his painfully acquired air of accepted
habit, and immediately, she was sitting between him and Mackenzie,
looking at the bundle of rough pencil drawings put into her hands,
outlines of rugged peaks, desolate plains, primitive hillside villages,
done with abundant determination but little skill. She listened to
Mackenzie's explanations without speaking, and was relieved to hand over
the packet to the Squire, who put on his glasses to examine them, and
drew the conversation away from her.

Mackenzie spoke but little to her after that. He dominated the
conversation, much more so than on the previous evening, when there had
been some little difficulty in extracting any account of his exploits
from him. Now he was willing to talk of them, and he talked well, not
exactly with modesty, but with no trace of boastful quality, such as
would certainly have aroused the prejudices of his listeners against
him.

He talked like a man with whom the subject under discussion was the one
subject in the world that interested him. One would have said that he
had nothing else in his mind but the lust for strange places to conquer.
He appeared to be obsessed by his life of travel, to be able to think of
nothing els