, bathing-suit, turned somersaults and did tricks in the tank of
water which looked so cold and uncomfortable to the non-amphibious. He
listened to his companion to-night, while he smoked his last pipe,
he watched her through her demonstration, quite as if he had paid a
shilling. But it was true that, this being the case, he desired the
value of his money. What was it, in the name of wonder, that she was so
bent on being responsible FOR? What did she pretend was going to happen,
and what, at the worst, could the poor girl do, even granting she
wanted to do anything? What, at the worst, for that matter, could she be
conceived to have in her head?

"If she had told me the moment she got here," Mrs. Assingham replied, "I
shouldn't have my difficulty in finding out. But she wasn't so obliging,
and I see no sign at all of her becoming so. What's certain is that
she didn't come for nothing. She wants"--she worked it out at her
leisure--"to see the Prince again. THAT isn't what troubles me. I mean
that such a fact, as a fact, isn't. But what I ask myself is, What does
she want it FOR?"

"What's the good of asking yourself if you know you don't know?" The
Colonel sat back at his own ease, with an ankle resting on the other
knee and his eyes attentive to the good appearance of an extremely
slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat integument of fine-spun
black silk and patent leather. It seemed to confess, this member, to
consciousness of military discipline, everything about it being as
polished and perfect, as straight and tight and trim, as a soldier on
parade. It went so far as to imply that someone or other would have
"got" something or other, confinement to barracks or suppression of
pay, if it hadn't been just as it was. Bob Assingham was distinguished
altogether by a leanness of person, a leanness quite distinct from
physical laxity, which might have been determined, on the part of
superior powers, by views of transport and accommodation, and which in
fact verged on the abnormal. He "did" himself as well as his friends
mostly knew, yet remained hungrily thin, with facial, with abdominal
cavities quite grim in their effect, and with a consequent looseness
of apparel that, combined with a choice of queer light shades and of
strange straw-like textures, of the aspect of Chinese mats, provocative
of wonder at his sources of supply, suggested the habit of tropic
islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship e