Stafford looked at him with some curiosity, for the event was one likely to rouse a man’s interest in a woman.  Al’mah was unmarried, so far as the world knew, and a man of Byng’s kind, if not generally inflammable, was very likely to be swept off his feet by some unusual woman in some unusual circumstance.  Stafford had never seen Rudyard Byng talk to any woman but Jasmine for more than five minutes at a time, though hundreds of eager and avaricious eyes had singled him out for attention; and, as it seemed absurd that any one should build a palace in Park Lane to live in by himself, the glances sent in his direction from many quarters had not been without hopefulness.  And there need not have been, and there was not, any loss of dignity on the part of match-making mothers in angling for him, for his family was quite good enough; his origin was not obscure, and his upbringing was adequate.  His external ruggedness was partly natural; but it was also got from the bitter rough life he had lived for so many years in South Africa before he had fallen on his feet at Kimberley and Johannesburg.

As for “strange women,” during the time that had passed since his retum to England there had never been any sign of loose living.  So, to Stafford’s mind, Byng was the more likely to be swept away on a sudden flood that would bear him out to the sea of matrimony.  He had put his question out of curiosity, and he had not to wait for a reply.  It came frankly and instantly: 

“Why, I was at Al’mah’s house in Bruton Street at eight o’clock this morning—­with the milkman and the newsboy; and you wouldn’t believe it, but I saw her, too.  She’d been up since six o’clock, she said.  Couldn’t sleep for excitement and pain, but looking like a pansy blossom all the same, rigged out as pretty as could be in her boudoir, and a nurse doing the needful.  It’s an odd dark kind of beauty she has, with those full lips and the heavy eyebrows.  Well, it was a bull in a china-shop, as you might judge—­and thank you kindly, Mr. Byng, with such a jolly laugh, and ever and ever and ever so grateful and so wonderfully—­thoughtful, I think, was the word, as though one had planned it all.  And wouldn’t I stay to breakfast?  And not a bit stagey or actressy, and rather what you call an uncut diamond—­a gem in her way, but not fine beur, not exactly.  A touch of the karoo, or the prairie, or the salt-bush plains in her, but a good chap altogether; and I’m glad I was in it last night with her.  I laughed a lot at breakfast—­why yes, I stayed to breakfast.  Laugh before breakfast and cry before supper, that’s the proverb, isn’t it?  And I’m crying, all right, and there’s weeping down on the Rand too.”