his first articulation,
so that not a moment may be lost. There were _two_ tigers--that's the
explanation. Harrisson shot one, and Graythorpe the other. The
cross-examiner is dissatisfied.

"Which was the one that shot the tiger two hundred yards off, just
behind the ear?"

The old gentleman responds with a spirited decision: "Your father,
my dear, your father. That tiger round at my rooms--show it you if
you like--that skin was given me by a feller named Harrisson, in the
Commissariat--quite another sort of Johnny. He was down with the
Central Indian Horse--quite another place!" He dwells on the
inferiority of this shot, the smallness of the skin, the close
contiguity of its owner. A very inferior affair!

But, being desperately afraid of blundering again, he makes the fact
he admits, that he had confoozed between the two cases, a reason for
a close analysis of the merits of each. This has no interest for
Sally, who, indeed, had only regarded the conversation, so far, as a
stepping-stone she now wanted to leap to the mainland from. After all,
here she is face-to-face with a man who actually knows the story of the
separation, and can talk of it without pain. Why should she not get
something from him, however little? You see, the idea of a something
that could not be told was necessarily foreign to a mind some
somethings could not be told to. But she felt it would be difficult to
account to Major Roper for her own position. The fact that she knew
nothing proved that her mother and Colonel Lund had been anxious she
should know nothing. She could not refer to an outsider over their
heads. Still, she hoped, as Major Roper was deemed on all hands an
arrant old gossip, that he might accidentally say something to enlighten
her. She prolonged the conversation in this hope.

"Was that before I was born?"

"The tiger-shootin'? Well, reely, my dear, I shouldn't like to say.
It's twenty years ago, you see. No, I couldn't say--couldn't say when
it was." He is beginning to pack himself in a long woollen scarf an
overcoat with fur facings will shortly cover in, and is, in fact,
preparing to evacuate a position he finds untenable. "I must be
thinkin' of gettin' home," he says. Sally tries for a word more.

"Was it before he and mother fell out?" It is on the Major's lips to
say, "Before the proceedings?" but he changes the expression.

"Before the split? Well, no; I should say after the split.
Yes--probably after the split."