id wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished
short-cropped hair.

"Better go, dearie. One must be polite, even if the heart breaks."

Jane Coop's literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled
"Real Stories from High Life" and Ouida's novels, which latter she had
bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched
between her Bible and "Grandmother's Herb Recipes."

"But I don't want to go. I hate crowds, and I can't take Wellington.
Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus
and growled. You remember? They thought it was the statue speaking,
and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard."

The bulldog loathed Egypt.

He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language.
He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion
had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of
pure boredom.

"Take me," he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as
could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail. But
excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and
more defined through grief.

"My heart isn't breaking, Janie!" Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.

"I know it isn't, dearie. There's nothing to break it over, _I'm_
sure. I was just repeating from 'Her Scarlet Sin', where the beautiful
heroine is torn between two stools as it were."

Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as
for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who
followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of
flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you
left your own country for heathen parts!

To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of
the day's programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in
Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the
rider's weight.

"You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle
don't go a-straying, with their monkey tricks," she had said tartly and
not over-lucidly, to her grace's maid, who had heard from someone who
had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours
of the night, here, there and everywhere. "I know what time she comes
in and where she has been, and who with, and that's quite enough for
me. Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!"

She was not exactly w