t toe the line for a start. Goin' off at that, we soon come
up to my knowin' the Colonel's not your grandfather." Major Roper does
not get through the whole of the last word--asthma forbids it--but his
meaning is clear. Only, Sally is a direct Turk, as we have seen, and
likes clearing up things.

"You know my friend Laetitia Wilson's mother, Major Roper?" The Major
expresses not only that he does, but that his respectful homage is due
to her as a fine woman--even a queenly one--by kissing his finger-tips
and raising his eyes to heaven. "Well, Laetitia (Tishy, I call her)
says you told her mother you knew my father in India, and went out
tiger-hunting with him, and he shot a tiger two hundred yards off and
gave you the skin." Sally lays stress on the two hundred yards as
a means of identification of the case. No doubt the Major owned many
skins, but shot at all sorts of distances.

It is embarrassing for the old boy, because he cannot ignore General
Pellew's intimations over Sally's head, which she does not see. He is
to hold his tongue--that is their meaning. Yes, but when you have made
a mistake, it may be difficult to begin holding it in the middle.
Perhaps it would have been safer to lose sight of the subject in the
desert of asthma, instead of reviving it the moment he got to an oasis.

"Some misunderstanding'," said he, when he could speak. "I've got a
tiger-skin the man who shot it gave me out near Nagpore, but he wasn't
your father." How true that was!

"Do you remember his name?" Sally wants him to say it was Palliser
again, to prove it all nonsense, but a warning finger of the old
General makes him desperate, and he selects, as partially true, the
supposed alias which--do you remember all this?--he had ascribed to
the tiger-shooter in his subsequent life in Australia.

"Perfectly well. His name was Harrisson. A fine shot. He went away
to Australia after that."

Sally laughs out. "How very absurd of Tishy!" she says. "She hadn't
even got the name you said right. _She_ said it was Palliser. It sounds
like Harrisson." She stopped to think a minute. "But even if she had
said it right it wouldn't be my father, because his name, you know,
was Graythorpe--like mine before we both changed to Nightingale--mother
and I. We did, you know."

Old Jack assents to this with an expenditure of breath not warranted
where breath is so scarce. He cannot say "of course," and that he
recollects, too often. Perhaps he is glad