“It was rather trying, but you could have left your husband to do most of the entertaining.”

“My husband was fifty miles up-country, talking sense, or what he imagined to be sense, to a village community that fancied one of their leading men was a were-tiger.”

“A what tiger?”

“A were-tiger; you’ve heard of were-wolves, haven’t you, a mixture of wolf and human being and demon?  Well, in those parts they have were-tigers, or think they have, and I must say that in this case, so far as sworn and uncontested evidence went, they had every ground for thinking so.  However, as we gave up witchcraft prosecutions about three hundred years ago, we don’t like to have other people keeping on our discarded practices; it doesn’t seem respectful to our mental and moral position.”

“I hope you weren’t unkind to the Bishop,” said Annabel.

“Well, of course he was my guest, so I had to be outwardly polite to him, but he was tactless enough to rake up the incidents of the old quarrel, and to try to make out that there was something to be said for the way his side of the family had behaved; even if there was, which I don’t for a moment admit, my house was not the place in which to say it.  I didn’t argue the matter, but I gave my cook a holiday to go and visit his aged parents some ninety miles away.  The emergency cook was not a specialist in curries, in fact, I don’t think cooking in any shape or form could have been one of his strong points.  I believe he originally came to us in the guise of a gardener, but as we never pretended to have anything that could be considered a garden he was utilised as assistant goat-herd, in which capacity, I understand, he gave every satisfaction.  When the Bishop heard that I had sent away the cook on a special and unnecessary holiday he saw the inwardness of the manoeuvre, and from that moment we were scarcely on speaking terms.  If you have ever had a Bishop with whom you were not on speaking terms staying in your house, you will appreciate the situation.”

Annabel confessed that her life-story had never included such a disturbing experience.

“Then,” continued Matilda, “to make matters more complicated, the Gwadlipichee overflowed its banks, a thing it did every now and then when the rains were unduly prolonged, and the lower part of the house and all the out-buildings were submerged.  We managed to get the ponies loose in time, and the syce swam the whole lot of them off to the nearest rising ground.  A goat or two, the chief goat-herd, the chief goat-herd’s wife, and several of their babies came to anchorage in the verandah.  All the rest of the available space was filled up with wet, bedraggled-looking hens and chickens; one never really knows how many fowls one possesses till the servants’ quarters are flooded out.  Of course, I had been through something of the sort in previous floods, but never before had I had a houseful of goats and babies and half-drowned hens, supplemented by a Bishop with whom I was hardly on speaking terms.”