“Why, where else would my cloak be?” she inquired with a little laugh.  “Not at the costumier’s or the cleaner’s so soon.  But, all this horrid flippancy aside, do you really think I should have talked like this, or been so exigent about the cloak, if I hadn’t known everything; if I hadn’t been to see Al’mah, and spent an hour with her and knew that she was recovering from that dreadful shock very quickly?  But could you think me so inhuman and unwomanly as not to have asked about her?”

“I wouldn’t be in a position to investigate much when you were talking—­not critically,” he replied, boldly.  “I would only be thinking that everything you said was all right.  It wouldn’t occur to me to—­”

She half closed her eyes, looking at him with languishing humour.  “Now you must please remember that I am quite young, and may have my head turned, and—­”

“It wouldn’t alter my mind about you if you turned your head,” he broke in, gallantly, with a desperate attempt to take advantage of an opportunity, and try his hand at a game entirely new to him.

There was an instant’s pause, in which she looked at him with what was half-assumed, half-natural shyness.  His attempt to play with words was so full of nature, and had behind it such apparent admiration, that the unspoiled part of her was suddenly made self-conscious, however agreeably so.  Then she said to him:  “I won’t say you were brave last night—­that doesn’t touch the situation.  It wasn’t bravery, of course; it was splendid presence of mind which could only come to a man with great decision of character.  I don’t think the newspapers put it at all in the right way.  It wasn’t like saving a child from the top of a burning building, was it?”

“There was nothing in it at all where I was concerned,” he replied.  “I’ve been living a life for fifteen years where you had to move quick—­by instinct, as it were.  There’s no virtue in it.  I was just a little quicker than a thousand other men present, and I was nearer to the stage.”

“Not nearer than my father or Mr. Stafford.”

“They had a bigger shock than I had, I suppose.  They got struck numb for a second.  I’m a coarser kind.  I have seen lots of sickening things; and I suppose they don’t stun me.  We get callous, I fancy, we veld-rangers and adventurers.”

“You seem sensitive enough to fine emotions,” she said, almost shyly.”  You were completely absorbed, carried away, by Al’mah’s singing last night.  There wasn’t a throb of music that escaped you, I should think.”

“Well, that’s primary instinct.  Music is for the most savage natures.  The boor that couldn’t appreciate the Taj Mahal, or the sculpture of Michael Angelo, might be swept off his feet by the music of a master, though he couldn’t understand its story.  Besides, I’ve carried a banjo and a cornet to the ends of the earth with me.  I saved my life with the cornet once.  A lion got inside my zareba in Rhodesia.  I hadn’t