Mr. Heard enjoyed that luncheon.  “The food, the wine, the service—­they were faultless; something altogether out of the way,” he declared with frank conviction.

“Then you must come again,” replied his host.  “How long did you say you were staying here?”

“Ten days or so.  It depends upon Mrs. Meadows and her movements.  I understand she is all alone up there, in the clouds.  Her husband’s leave has been postponed for the second time.  He was going to pick her up on his way to England.  She had to leave India before him, on account of the child.”

“A pretty baby.  Couldn’t stand the climate, I suppose.”

“Exactly.  My mother asked me to look in and cheer her up a little, and perhaps take her back with me.  And really,” he added, “it’s rather awkward!  I have not seen my cousin since she was a little girl.  What does she look like?”

“Tailor-made.  Looks as if she rode well and knew her own mind.  Looks as if she had been through a good deal of trouble.”

“I daresay she has.  She was always impetuous, even as a child.  That first marriage was not at all a success.  Some foreign scoundrel who deserted her and vanished.  I was in China at the time, but my mother wrote me about it.”

“A first marriage?  She never told me about that.”

“This second one was a love match.  They ran away together.  They must have had a hard time out there at first, living as they did.  No doubt she has learnt to know her own mind; one has to cope with emergencies in a life like that.  He has done well, I hear.  A charming fellow, from all accounts, though I question whether they are properly married even now.”

“Perhaps they can’t be,” replied Mr. Keith, “in view of the earlier affair.  But how will they educate that boy, in India?  It can’t be done.  India is no better than Bampopo, for such purposes.  Did you do much educational work in Africa?  I hope you were gentle with my friends the Bulaga?”

“We baptized two or three hundred of them one day.  But they behaved shockingly the very next week—­quite disgracefully!  They are hopeless, those friends of yours, though one cannot help liking them somehow.  I got through good deal of other work of that kind,” he added.

“I see you are a man of action.  Sometimes I wish I were.  A little money has made me lazy, I’m afraid.  But I do some thinking, and a fair lot of reading.  I travel, I observe, I compare.  Among other things I observe that our English system of education is all wrong.  We ought to return to that old Camp-and-Court ideal.”

“All wrong?” queried the bishop.

“Take a case like that young fellow Denis.  What is a child of his age doing at a University?  No.  If I had a son—­but I am boring you.”

“I have not been bored since I was twenty.”