“We love it,” he insisted.  “We never see it without a lump in our throats.  But we ask ourselves, How long is this affection to count for nothing?  What are we to get in return?”

No one answered, perhaps because no one knew.  My thoughts had flown forward to a small riverside church in England, and a memorial window to one whose body had been found after Isandlwhana with the same flag wrapped around it beneath the tunic.  This was his reward.

“Hey?  What’s this?” Mr. Olstein took the subscription list, fitted his gold-rimmed glasses and eyed the delegate over the paper.  “Athletic sports?  Not much in your line, I should say.”

“No, sir;” and while the delegate bent his eyes a bright spot showed on either cheek.  He was a weedy, hollow-chested man, about six feet in height, with tell-tale pits at the back of the neck, and a ragged beard evidently grown on the voyage.  “I’m only a collector, with the captain’s permission.”

“I see.”  Mr. Olstein pulled out a sovereign.  “I don’t put this on you, mind; I can tell a consumptive with half an eye.  See here”—­he appealed to us—­“this is just what we suffer from.  You fellows with lung trouble flock to a tepid hole like Madeira, while the Cape would cure you in half the time:  why, the voyage itself only begins to be decent after you get south!  But you won’t see it; and the people who do see it are just the sort who don’t pay us when they come, and damage us when they go back,—­hard cases, sent out to pick up a living as well as their health, who get stranded and hurry home half-cured.”

A young Briton in the deck-chair next to mine rose and walked off abruptly, while I fumbled for a coin, ashamed to meet the collector’s eye.

“Hullo!” Mr. Olstein grinned at me.  “Our friend’s in a hurry to dodge the subscription list.”

But the young Briton turned and intercepted the collector as he moved towards the next group.

“It’s your sovereign,” said I, “that seems to be overlooked.”

Mr. Olstein saw it at his elbow and re-pocketed it.  “Well, if he hasn’t the sense to pick it up, I’ve some more than to whistle him back.  But that’ll show you the sort of fool we send out to compete with Germans and suchlike.  It’s enough to make a man ashamed of his country.”

This happened on a Saturday morning, and in the afternoon we attended the sports—­a depressing ceremony.  The performers went through their contests, so to speak, with bated breath and a self-consciousness which, try as we might, poisoned our applause and made it insufferably patronising.  Their backers would pluck up heart and encourage them loudly with Whitechapel catch-words, and anon would hush their voices in uneasy shame.  Our collector, brave by fits in his dignity as steward, would catch the eye of a saloon-deck passenger and shrink behind the enormous rosette which some wag had pinned upon him.