"I don't care if he is!" Jean flared back. "It isn't fair to-- to----" Jean was very close to tears. "You too, Frank!" she exclaimed, suddenly turning her wrath upon me, "You sat there like a mummy never saying a word----" "Well, that should let me out, I had nothing to do with----" "Yes, you did! I saw you snicker! You're as bad as Jack, and you would have said the same things, if you had been bright enough." That was a body blow, but Spoof came to my rescue. "Oh, I say!" he exclaimed, "can't we have some tea? Beastly dry business, homesteading; no afternoon tea. I must speak to my man about that. He's the same man as mixes my whisky and sodas, according to the Governor's idea of it," Spoof explained. The suggestion of tea confronted the girls with work, which, in proper doses, is the universal restorer of good humor. They went inside, and when in a short while they brought out tea and sandwiches the storm had swept by, with only a dash of color in Jean's cheeks, like a rainbow in an afternoon sky, to mark its passing. "Do you know," said Spoof, when the girls had cleared up the tea things and were out of hearing, "the thing of which I stand most in need at the present moment--that thing which is so essentially English, and from which I have been divorced for more days than I care to number--that thing for which I would gladly give half of my kingdom, meaning the north-west quarter of section Two? No? Observe the blushes beneath my sunburned cuticle as I admit that for weeks I have not had a bath. For weeks, literally. If my poor Governor could know that, not even the hide of a polar bear would reconcile him to leaving me to live the life of a savage." "We can soon fix that--I mean, we can furnish the wherewithal," said I, "and I will expect the deed of eighty acres in return." So we led Spoof down to the pond, which the sun, now well over to the west, was burnishing with hues of burnt-orange and amber. Along its grassy shore on the northern side a score or more wild ducks were feeding, some of them tail-tilted in the air as they grubbed the roots in the shallow water. Their only notice of us was to move a little closer to the bank, while two or three worried mothers gathered their broods in little fluffy phalanxes behind them. "My word, my word!" said Spoof. "Why didn't Jake tell me about this? I will have that land guide's gizzard for this omission! . . . And how tame they are!" "No shooting yet," I explained. "It isn't fair to the youngsters; but there's a great day coming. But the water is fine, and deep enough toward the middle." "My word, if only I had a bathing suit! I say, do you think there would be any great danger--any danger at all, that is--of an interruption?"