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But for Bubbles, but for her infectious high spirits and vitality, how very heavy and stupid the meal they were now ending would have been! She asked herself, for perhaps the twentieth time in the last three-quarters of an hour, why her friend had brought together such a curious and ill-assorted set of people. At last she looked across at Miss Burnaby, and gradually everyone got up.
Burnaby paused a moment where he had shaken hands, and then, with the long stride characteristic of him, went to the window and, drawing aside the curtain, peered into the darkness beyond. He stood listening until the purr of a great motor rose and died on the snow-muffled air. "He's gone!" he said, and turned back into the room. He spread his arms out and dropped them to his sides.
"You told me," she said accusingly, "that this man this Mr. Burnaby, has all the primitive virtues; he is the wickedest man I have ever met." "Good gracious!" said Mrs. Ennis. "The very wickedest!" Pollen's mouth twisted under his mustache. "I wouldn't have suspected it," he observed, surveying Burnaby with ironic amusement. There was just a hint of hidden condescension in his voice.
"I don't think Miss Burnaby would enjoy that at all." "Oh, but she would!" Bubbles spoke confidently. "Didn't you hear her at dinner? She was telling Sir Lyon about some friend of hers who's become tremendously keen about that sort of thing. It's a strange old house; there's a funny kind of atmosphere about it; I felt it the moment I arrived." The other looked at her sharply.
All light. Me clean housee." But, though he had won this diplomatic victory, Casey was not satisfied. Finally he took his perplexities to Sheila, enlisting her aid in problems of decoration and the like. "Where does this Miss Burnaby come in?" she asked. "Who is she?" Casey told her, and she frowned dubiously. "Seems to me you butted into real society when you went outside, Casey.
"There isn't much to tell, and that little not very entertaining. You see, Miss Burnaby, if my youthful mouth was ever acquainted with a silver spoon it was snatched away at a tender age." "I beg your pardon," said Clyde quickly. "I'm afraid my request was impertinent." "Not at all. I went West when I was a kid, and I've seen quite a bit of country.
Before starting, Colonel Burnaby had been designated to assume the command in case of any accident happening to the general; but Burnaby had fallen at Abu Klea, and it therefore devolved upon Sir Charles Wilson, who was accompanying the force solely in a diplomatic capacity, and who was to push up the river in one of the steamers and communicate with General Gordon as soon as the force reached the Nile.
Burnaby had come down from the netting and disposed his vast person amongst us and the bags of ballast. He was driven down by the smell of gas, which threatened to suffocate us all when we started.
"Sheriff," he said, "I've just come, and naturally I don't know all that has happened, but there are two or three things I want you to know. In the first place, my niece, Miss Burnaby, is going to marry this man Dunne. And, in the second place, I'm now running this irrigation company and the railway that owns it, and so far as any prosecutions are concerned I won't have anything to do with them.
"She is like a mist," thought Mrs. Malcolm. "Exactly like a rather faint mist." Burnaby leaned over and lit a cigarette at one of the candles. "And, of course," he said quietly, without raising his head, "the curious thing is that this fellow Morton, despite all his talk of power, in the end is merely a ghost of Bewsher, after all, isn't he?"
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