During these eight years Mrs. Bazzard’s persistent letters to Sir Bennet Molyneux had their reward. Her Spencer was removed from malarial, out-of-the-world East Africa and made Consul-General at Halicarnassus, to preside with judicial functions over a Consular Court in Asia Minor, on £900 a year and allowances. Mrs. Bazzard foresaw for herself a glorious early autumn to her life, as a leading lady in the Levant, with an occasional dress from Paris, a prominence in Levantine Society, a possible visit of the Royal yacht to this old-world Turkish harbour where Herodotos once lived and wrote; and inevitably a knighthood on retirement for the re-animated doll, the Spencer into whom she had really infused new stuffing. "Oh, that _dearest_ Mother might live"—in Bayswater, it would not do to have her at Halicarnassus—"to refer to her daughter as ’Lady Bazzard’!" She has long ceased to take much interest in the Brenthams, once Roger Brentham—with whom she believes herself to have had a serious and compromising flirtation in 1887, and sometimes hints as much to her Spencer when his interest in her flags—no longer has his name in lists of officials likely to get between Spencer and a Mediterranean post. She is, however, a little annoyed from time to time to see he is not socially dead ... that highly placed officials actually notice him. For instance, the Bazzards when at home in 1902 could not obtain, try they ever so hard, a place in the Abbey to see King Edward crowned. But Roger saw the ceremony from a modest nook inside the nave; saw Sibyl in ermine and crimson velvet and ostrich plumes, nodding right and left to acquaintances and wreathed in smiles, pass before him with other peers and peeresses to her appointed place; and probably owed his seat to the intervention of the African Department of the Foreign Office, or to a request from the President of the Royal Geographical Society, as the recognition due to a distinguished explorer. He had forgotten by now any rancour he might have retained for the Foreign Office, and would drop in at the African Department from time to time for a chat with "Rosy" Walrond—who was proposing to go to Unguja to tighten things up, and intended to come and stay with him in the Happy Valley and see with his own incredulous eyes the Red Crater and its bottomless pit, and the lovely maidens of Iraku who were the cause of Mrs. Anderson’s heartbreak. Or with Ted Parsons—about to be named Consul-General at Naples; or kind old Snarley Yow, who said he wished now he had done like Roger: chucked the F.O. and a possible pension of £700 a year and gone in for an African Concession like the Happy Valley—suit him down to the ground.