se could it be? He asked where she had gone to. The gentleman most
thoughtfully stroked his beard.

He would try to remember. Were not her ears--. Here such a violent fit
of coughing seized him that he ran away into the house. An ill-fed
clerk and a dirty barman standing in the doorway laughed aloud. Gregory
wondered if they could be laughing at the gentleman's cough, and then he
heard some one laughing in the room into which the gentleman had gone.
He must follow him and try to learn more; but he soon found that there
was nothing more to be learnt there. Poor Gregory!

Backward and forward, backward and forward, from the dirty little hotel
where he had dropped the thread, to this farm and to that, rode Gregory,
till his heart was sick and tired. That from that spot the wagon might
have gone its own way and the spider another was an idea that did
not occur to him. At last he saw it was no use lingering in that
neighbourhood, and pressed on.

One day coming to a little town, his horses knocked up, and he resolved
to rest them there. The little hotel of the town was a bright and sunny
place, like the jovial face of the clean little woman who kept it,
and who trotted about talking always--talking to the customers in the
taproom, and to the maids in the kitchen, and to the passers-by when she
could hail them from the windows; talking, as good-natured women with
large mouths and small noses always do, in season and out.

There was a little front parlour in the hotel, kept for strangers who
wanted to be alone. Gregory sat there to eat his breakfast, and the
landlady dusted the room and talked of the great finds at the Diamond
Fields, and the badness of maid-servants, and the shameful conduct of
the Dutch parson in that town to the English inhabitants. Gregory ate
his breakfast and listened to nothing. He had asked his one question,
and had had his answer; now she might talk on.

Presently a door in the corner opened and a woman came out--a
Mozambiquer, with a red handkerchief twisted round her head. She
carried in her hand a tray, with a slice of toast crumbled fine, and a
half-filled cup of coffee, and an egg broken open, but not eaten. Her
ebony face grinned complacently as she shut the door softly and said,
"Good morning."

The landlady began to talk to her.

"You are not going to leave her really, Ayah, are you?" she said. "The
maids say so; but I'm sure you wouldn't do such a thing."

The Mozambiquer grinned.