“I don’t want to go, Janie dear,” she said, the preceding night, whilst the devoted maid wielded strong-bristled brushes on the burnished short-cropped hair.

“Better go, dearie.  One must be polite, even if the heart breaks.”

Jane Coop’s literary plane swung between a three-penny weekly entitled “Real Stories from High Life” and Ouida’s novels, which latter she had bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road and kept sandwiched between her Bible and “Grandmother’s Herb Recipes.”

“But I don’t want to go.  I hate crowds, and I can’t take Wellington.  Every native flies from him since he got behind the Musical Colossus and growled.  You remember?  They thought it was the statue speaking, and the dear old darling was only trying to catch a lizard.”

The bulldog loathed Egypt.

He was always either in disgrace or being talked to in baby language.  He had seen next to nothing of his beloved mistress, and his digestion had been almost ruined by the amount of chocolates he had eaten out of pure boredom.

“Take me,” he said, every time his beloved went out, as plainly as could be by means of his beautiful face and down-cast tail.  But excursions had grown rarer and rarer and his slender middle more and more defined through grief.

“My heart isn’t breaking, Janie!” Damaris declared, sitting up in bed.

“I know it isn’t, dearie.  There’s nothing to break it over, I’m sure.  I was just repeating from ‘Her Scarlet Sin’, where the beautiful heroine is torn between two stools as it were.”

Jane Coop had no use for knights who left the field of combat; and as for the tales which were duly carried to her of an Arabian chief who followed her young mistress in the desert and sent her bunches of flowers and such-like trash, well! it was all you could expect if you left your own country for heathen parts!

To Jane Coop, rides in the desert in Egypt were just as much a part of the day’s programme as rides on donkeys at holiday-time had been in Margate, before interfering people began to make a fuss about the rider’s weight.

“You mind your own hedges, Maria Hobson, and see that your own cattle don’t go a-straying, with their monkey tricks,” she had said tartly and not over-lucidly, to her grace’s maid, who had heard from someone who had heard from someone else that Miss Hethencourt was out at all hours of the night, here, there and everywhere.  “I know what time she comes in and where she has been, and who with, and that’s quite enough for me.  Thank you, I can shepherd my own flock!”

She was not exactly within the confines of truth in her statement, but having learned in her youth to diagnose the hurt of dumb animals, she felt she was fully qualified to treat her beloved child’s unrest without any verbal aid from outsiders.

Yet something, a warning from the future, maybe, had prompted her to speak this night as she stood beside the bed, looking down upon the beauty of the child to whom she seemed, more than anyone else, to stand in the position of sponsor.