and dress for dinner. We're just ourselves. What
flower is your honour's ladyship commanding for the table?"

"Just ourselves?" she said, looking at the crotons in the great hall.
"Then let's have marigolds the little cemetery ones."

So it was ordered.

Now, marigolds to us mean hot weather, discomfort, parting, and death.
That smell in our nostrils, and Adam's servant in waiting, we naturally
fell back more and more on the old slang, recalling at each glass those
who had gone before. We did not sit at the big table, but in the bay
window overlooking the park, where they were carting the last of the
hay. When twilight fell we would not have candles, but waited for the
moon, and continued our talk in the dusk that makes one remember.

Young Adam was not interested in our past except where it had touched
his future. I think his mother held his hand beneath the table. Imam
Din--shoeless, out of respect to the floors--brought him his medicine,
poured it drop by drop, and asked for orders.

"Wait to take him to his cot when he grows weary," said his mother, and
Imam Din retired into the shadow by the ancestral portraits.

"Now what d'you expect to get out of your country?" the Infant asked,
when--our India laid aside we talked Adam's Africa. It roused him at
once.

"Rubber--nuts--gums--and so on," he said. "But our real future is
cotton. I grew fifty acres of it last year in my District."

"My District!" said his father. "Hear him, Mummy!"

"I did though! I wish I could show you the sample. Some Manchester chaps
said it was as good as any Sea Island cotton on the market."

"But what made you a cotton-planter, my son?" she asked.

"My Chief said every man ought to have a shouk (a hobby) of sorts, and
he took the trouble to ride a day out of his way to show me a belt of
black soil that was just the thing for cotton."

"Ah! What was your Chief like?" Stalky asked, in his silkiest tones.

"The best man alive--absolutely. He lets you blow your own nose
yourself. The people call him"--Adam jerked out some heathen
phrase--"that means the Man with the Stone Eyes, you know."

"I'm glad of that. Because I've heard from other quarters" Stalky's
sentence burned like a slow match, but the explosion was not long
delayed. "Other quarters!" Adam threw out a thin hand. "Every dog has
his fleas. If you listen to them, of course!" The shake of his head was
as I remembered it among his father's policemen twenty years before, an