t the untoward occurrences of the day
which had supplied his solid, trustworthy brain with the outline of a
key to the problem.

Dear, stolid old Jan, who, given the time, could beat anyone at
unravelling the hardest, hard-tied, knotted problem.

With a tale of sudden faintness he gave her into the care of Edna
Talbot, who cooed and fluttered over her like the woman she was, in
spite of her workmanlike appearance and her outrageous craving for a
big meal. And she herded the sahibs to the far end of the court, where
lay the sick man, after the big meal in which Leonie had joined right
heartily; a little white about the face, truly, and shadowed about the
eyes, but normal and content, with not the vaguest recollection of what
had happened after the killing of the tiger.

"Oh! don't be dense," Edna Talbot said quite brusquely when Guy Dean,
having brutally ignored the suffering native, suggested returning to
the others. "You surely don't want to make a triangle."

"Triangle--what!"

"Well, you know the old saying about two being company, don't you?"

"Of course I do--that's where it comes in," replied the lad not over
lucidly, "_I_ want to make the two!"

The major laughed at the rueful countenance, as he clapped the boy on
the shoulder.

"You'll get over it all right, old fellow; it's just like inoculation,
a feeble taste of something which might have been ever so much worse.
Trust me, you'll get over it!"

"_Never_!" stoutly maintained young Dean as he heaved a stone at
something which fled across the court, his mental vision failing to
register a picture of the future in which Jill Wetherbourne, daughter
of Molly and Jack, occupied the principal position.

Later, Leonie, sitting with Jan Cuxson on a block of fallen masonry,
smiled sweetly upon the head _shikari_, who, salaaming, prayed her to
honour him by accepting a little memento of the _shikar_ which had
terminated so successfully upon the slaying of the tiger.

In his open palm he held two small bones about two and a half inches in
length, two little superstitious tokens which ensure sons to the woman
who treasures them, and which, he told her in his broken English, were
only found in the tiger, one on each side of the chest, unconnected
with any other bone at all.

"It is a charm, O! Mem Sahib, defender of the poor, which will
assuredly bring you happiness.

"And may the sons of the sahib grow straight as the pine tree," he
added slowly in his o