“Expensive isn’t the word,” he rejoined; “it was unpurchasable.”

She preened herself a little at the phrase.  “I returned your overcoat this morning—­before breakfast; and I didn’t even receive a note of thanks for it.  I might properly have kept it till my opera cloak came back.”

“It’s never coming back,” he answered; “and as for my overcoat, I didn’t know it had been returned.  I was out all the morning.”

“In the Row?” she asked, with an undertone of meaning.

“Well, not exactly.  I was out looking for your cloak.”

“Without breakfast?” she urged with a whimsical glance.

“Well, I got breakfast while I was looking.”

“And while you were indulging material tastes, the cloak hid itself—­or went out and hanged itself?”

He settled himself comfortably in the huge chair which seemed made especially for him.  With a rare sense for details she had had this very chair brought from the library beyond, where her stepmother, in full view, was writing letters.  He laughed at her words—­a deep, round chuckle it was.

“It didn’t exactly hang itself; it lay over the back of a Chesterfield where I could see it and breakfast too.”

“A Chesterfield in a breakfast-room!  That’s more like the furniture of a boudoir.”

“Well, it was a boudoir.”  He blushed a little in spite of himself.

“Ah!...  Al’mah’s?  Well, she owed you a breakfast, at least, didn’t she?”

“Not so good a breakfast as I got.”

“That is putting rather a low price on her life,” she rejoined; and a little smile of triumph gathered at her pink lips; lips a little like those Nelson loved not wisely yet not too well, if love is worth while at all.

“T didn’t see where you were leading me,” he gasped, helplessly.  “I give up.  I can’t talk in your way.”

“What is my way?” she pleaded with a little wave of laughter in her eyes.

“Why, no frontal attacks—­only flank movements, and getting round the kopjes, with an ambush in a drift here and there.”

“That sounds like Paul Kruger or General Joubert,” she cried in mock dismay.  “Isn’t that what they are doing with Dr. Jameson, perhaps?”

His face clouded.  Storm gathered slowly in his eyes, a grimness suddenly settled in his strong jaw.  “Yes,” he answered, presently, “that’s what they will be doing; and if I’m not mistaken they’ll catch Jameson just as you caught me just now.  They’ll catch him at Doornkop or thereabouts, if I know myself—­and Oom Paul.”

Her face flushed prettily with excitement.  “I want to hear all about this empire-making, or losing, affair; but there are other things to be settled first.  There’s my opera-cloak and the breakfast in the prima donna’s boudoir, and—­”

“But, how did you know it was Al’mah?” he asked blankly.