“If you shrug your shoulders again, damn you, I’ll sjambok you here as Kruger did at Vleifontein,” said Barry Whalen in a low, angry voice.  “You’ve been too long without the sjambok.”

“This is not the Vaal, it is Englan’,” answered Krool, huskily.  “The Law—­here!”

“Zo you stink ze law of England would help you—­eh?” asked Sobieski, with a cruel leer, relapsing into his natural vernacular.

“I mean what I say, Krool,” interposed Barry Whalen, fiercely, motioning Sobieski to silence.  “I will sjambok you till you can’t move, here in England, here in this house, if you shrug your shoulders again, or lift an eyebrow, or do one damned impudent thing.”

He got up and rang a bell.  A footman appeared.  “There is a rhinoceros-hide whip, on the wall of Mr. Byng’s study.  Bring it here,” he said, quietly, but with suppressed passion.

“Don’t be crazy, Whalen,” said Wallstein, but with no great force, for he would richly have enjoyed seeing the spy and traitor under the whip.  Stafford regarded the scene with detached, yet deep and melancholy interest.

While they waited, Krool seemed to shrink a little; but as he watched like some animal at bay, Stafford noticed that his face became venomous and paler, and some sinister intention showed in his eyes.

The whip was brought and laid upon the table beside Barry Whalen, and the footman disappeared, looking curiously at the group and at Krool.

Barry Whalen’s fingers closed on the whip, and now a look of fear crept over Krool’s face.  If there was one thing calculated to stir with fear the Hottentot blood in him, it was the sight of the sjambok.  He had native tendencies and predispositions out of proportion to the native blood in him—­maybe because he had ever been treated more like a native than a white man by his Boer masters in the past.

As Stafford viewed the scene, it suddenly came home to him how strange was this occurrence in Park Lane.  It was medieval, it belonged to some land unslaked of barbarism.  He realized all at once how little these men around him represented the land in which they were living, and how much they were part of the far-off land which was now in the throes of war.

To these men this was in one sense an alien country.  Through the dulled noises of London there came to their ears the click of the wheels of a cape-wagon, the crack of the Kaffir’s whip, the creak of the disselboom.  They followed the spoor of a company of elephants in the East country, they watched through the November mist the blesbok flying across the veld, a herd of quaggas taking cover with the rheebok, or a cloud of locusts sailing out of the sun to devastate the green lands.  Through the smoky smell of London there came to them the scent of the wattle, the stinging odour of ten thousand cattle, the reek of a native kraal, the sharp sweetness of orange groves, the aromatic air of the karoo, laden with the breath of a thousand