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CHAPTER VII.

ABOUT noon of the following day the party found themselves shepherded on board a trim little vessel which lay moored a hundred yards from the jetty of Port Florence. Thick awnings warded off the sun; the deck, with its white wood and gleaming brass, was as trim as the parlour of a Dutch housewife; a light breeze ruffled the blue water and fluttered among the feathery palm-leaves on the shore. Steam had been got up, and five minutes after embarking they were gliding through the hot shallows to the mouth of the bay. The sound of ship's bells and the airy freshness of the deck delighted the guests with a mingled sense of homeliness and strangeness. The arrival of a large English mail provided abundant occupation for, at any rate, the early hours of the voyage.

The women wore the lightest of gowns and the men were in flannels. Lady Warcliff, as the daughter of an admiral, assumed a proprietary

air when her feet trod a deck, though she was a bad sailor and abhorred the sea. Faithful to her

duty, she carried off Carey on a tour of inspection, leaving her letters at the mercy of any vagrant wind which cared to bear them to the fishes of Lake Victoria. The Duchess, in a deckchair, opened her correspondence with the rapidity of a conjuror, and distributed fragments of information to Lady Flora and Mrs Wilbraham, who, having had small mails, were busy with a bundle of home papers.

"George is in Scotland. He says the weather is dreadful, and that he has had nothing from the river but three small grilse. How vexatious! I know exactly what will happen. He will get no more, and then he'll spend the whole winter doing calculations how many hundreds these grilse cost him a pound.. Pamela has gone to Ireland with Mary Daventer. Flora, I wonder what mischief your mother will do there? She is much too theatrical to be allowed to dabble in politics, for she would turn a parish council into a Guy Fawkes conspiracy. Eve Nottingham has written a book, purporting to be the letters of a Japanese wife to her English mother-in-law. What will that silly woman be after next? She has never been outside Europe, so she picks out Japan for her

theme. She might as well write the letters of a Coptic greengrocer to his Abyssinian grandmother. I suppose it will be the usual erotic outpouring, which the newspapers will call 'intimate' and 'poignant,' and well - brought-up girls won't be allowed to read. The Prime Minister has made a good speech about either criminal aliens or Jerusalem artichokes-I cannot read Georgiana's writing,-and Violet Hexham is going to marry her chauffeur. Really, English news is very tiresome. How glad I

am to be in Central Africa instead of at Cowes !"

Mrs Wilbraham arose with an air of tragedy, sombrely brandishing 'The Times.' "A disaster of the first magnitude has befallen the Empire! Sir Herbert Jupp has made a speech.'

"Where did the horrid affair take place?" Lord Appin asked.

"At the annual dinner of the Amalgamated Society of South African Operators' Benevolent Fund, when Sir Herbert was the guest of the evening. He said-I quote 'The Times'—that 'we had suffered too long from the tyranny of the foreigner, and that it was high time we began to get a little of our own back. The Mother must summon her children around her knees and grapple them to her with hooks of

steel' (it sounds as if the children were going to have a lively time of it). Against a united empire,' says Sir Herbert, 'no powers of darkness can prevail. We fling back the jealousy and hate of the globe in its teeth, content with the affection of our own kinsfolk. We have truckled too long before the insolence of Europe. Let the Island Race show a haughty front to the world, remembering its God-given mission and its immortal destiny. If the Lord be for us who can be against us!' What a crusader! I did not think Master Shallow had been a man of this mettle!"

Lady Flora had been reading a Liberal paper. "Here's another man who appeals to high Heaven. On Friday, August 2, in the Bermondsey Tabernacle, the Reverend Doctor PriceMorgan delivered what this paper calls an 'electric appeal, instinct with a certain fine quality.' I see that he describes the Empire as

'blood-stained monument of human folly,' and he calls imperialists men without conscience, without honour, without patriotism, without God.' I hope you recognise your portrait, Sir Edward. Let us,' he says, 'destroy the accursed thing and return to the old simple paths whence we strayed.' Can he mean Elizabethan piracy? He concludes nobly with 'A nation

without a conscience is like a man groping in the dark on the verge of a precipice.' Will somebody explain to me about the Nonconformist Conscience?"

"The Nonconformist Conscience, my dear," said Lord Appin, "is too big a thing to be defined casually at mid-day on a tropical lake. It is the name which most people give to the particular national failing from which they happen to be exempt. Under its shade the militant freethinker and the gentle pietist lie down like lambs together. Very often it has nothing to do with conscience. Certain people choose to defend certain things in which they believe by appealing to morals and religion, when the real reason of their belief is some

thing quite different. In these cases it is a mannerism of speech rather than of thought. With many it is a condemnation of certain gross and robust shortcomings to which they are not inclined, by means of which they distract attention from their own less masculine vices of lying, dishonesty, and cowardice. With those of a particular religious persuasion it can best be described, I think, as the homage which a feeble present pays to a strong past. At one time with Nonconformists rested the liberties of England, and nobly they fought the battle.