My husband, with the rest of the company, had looked up at the awkward incident, and I thought I saw by his curious grimace that he supposed my father (of whom he was always in fear) had told me to assert myself.  But Alma, with surer instinct, was clearly thinking of Martin, and almost immediately she began to speak of him.

“So your great friend has just gone, dearest.  The servants are crazy about him.  We’ve missed him again, you see.  Too bad!  I hope you gave him our regrets and excuses—­did you?”

The evil one must have taken hold of me by this time, for I said: 

“I certainly did not, Alma.”

“Why not, my love?”

“Because we have a saying in our island that it’s only the ass that eats the cushag”—­a bitter weed that grows in barren places.

Alma joined in the general laughter which followed this rather intemperate reply, and then led off the conversation On the incidents of the cruise.

I gathered that, encouraged by her success in capturing the Bishop by her entertainment, she had set herself to capture the “aristocracy” of our island by inviting them to a dance on the yacht, while it lay at anchor off Holmtown, and the humour of the moment was to play battledore and shuttlecock with the grotesque efforts of our great people (the same that had figured at my wedding) to grovel before my husband and his guests.

“I say, Jimmy,” cried Mr. Vivian in his shrill treble, “do you remember the old gal in the gauze who—­etc . . . ?”

“But do you remember,” cried Mr. Eastcliff, “the High Bailiff or Bum Bailiff with the bottle-nose who—­etc . . . ?”

“Killing, wasn’t it, Vivian?” said one of the ladies.

“Perfectly killing,” said everybody.

This shocking exhibition of bad manners had not gone on very long before I became aware that it was being improvised for my benefit.

After Alma had admitted that the Bishop was a “great flirt” of hers, and Mr. Vivian, amid shouts of laughter, had christened him her “crush,” she turned to me and said, with her smiling face slightly drawn down on one side: 

“Mary, my love, you will certainly agree that your islanders who do not eat cushags, poor dears, are the funniest people alive as guests.”

“Not funnier,” I answered, “than the people who laugh at them as hosts.”

It was not easy to laugh at that, so to cover Alma’s confusion the men turned the talk to their usual topic, horses and dogs, and I heard a great deal about “laying on the hounds,” which culminated in a rather vulgar story of how a beater who “wasn’t nippy on his pins” had been “peppered from behind,” whereupon he had “bellowed like a bull” until “soothed down by a sov.”

I cannot say how long the talk would have continued in this manner if old Mrs. Lier, addressing herself to me, had not struck a serious subject.

It was about Alma’s dog, which was dead.  The poor wheezy, spaniel had died in the course of the cruise, though what the cause of its death was nobody knew, unless it had been fretting for its mistress during the period of quarantine which the absurd regulations of government had required on our return from abroad.