"My dear Miss Slade, you really mustn't worry about a matter you've no concern in whatever. The whole thing's a 'regrettable incident'--I believe that's the proper term--that Mr. Smith told me has been brewing for years. It's all due to the drop in the price of palm oil on the Liverpool market, which means that we white traders pay less for it on the Coast here, and the black traders get less, and so there's less for the King of Okky to squeeze out of them as they march through his territory from the hinterland. That's what's put his fat back up. The only great mistake that's been made is that I didn't split the old brute's iniquitous skull when I had the chance. I say, do you mind my commenting on those flowers you've got on the table? I haven't seen a cut flower since I left England." He turned to his host. "You do the thing rather palatially here, Mr. Slade. Board walls and real glass in the windows! We've bamboo walls at Malla-Nulla that let in the dust and the mosquitoes and the Krooboys' stares just as they occur. It felt rather like living in a bird-cage till one got used to it." "The walls are Laura's doing. You know she was at school in a convent in Las Palmas, and came home with all sorts of extravagant notions. Why, she actually insisted on a tablecloth for meals, and napkins. I'll trouble you, napkins! And yet they still call us palm oil ruffians in Liverpool, and firmly believe that we live on orange-colored palm oil chop, which we pick out of calabashes with our fingers. I sent K. O'Neill a photograph of this room by the last mail, with the table laid for chop, and flowers as you see in a china bowl, in the hope he'd be impressed by it, and raise my screw." "He's quite likely to do it, too," said Carter, "if I understand Mr. K. right. He's always insisting in his letters to Malla-Nulla that if we make ourselves comfortable, and adapt ourselves to the climate, we shall be able to do more and better work. By the way, do you know Mr. K. O'Neill at all? At Malla-Nulla we only know him on paper." "I'm in the same box," Slade confessed. "Godfrey, his predecessor, of course I knew well enough. But this new chap I only know from his letters, and they're a deal too rousing for my easy-going tastes. Ah, here's the boy with a tray of chop for you. Observe the parsley; that's Laura's latest triumph in Coast gardening. Boy, Mr. Carter will sleep in the spare bed in my room. See that there are no live things inside the mosquito bar." "I thank you," said Carter firmly, "but I am going to do as I said." "He wants to go back to Malla-Nulla," Slade explained to his daughter, "and I tell him it is suicide to think of such a thing. Here, you have a go at him, Laura." Slade always put off onto someone else anything which he found hard to do himself.