A moment after another lady with gold hair and a dazzling complexion glided up and nimbly took the seat on Brentham’s left hand. The Captain was absent and intimated that they needn’t expect him till the _Jeddah_ was away from Plymouth and out of the Channel. The other lady passengers were breakfasting in the Ladies’ Saloon. As soon as they were seated and porridge was being offered, the lady on Brentham’s left introduced herself as the wife of a colleague: "My husband is Spencer Bazzard, the Vice-Consul at Unguja—I dare say you’ve heard about him at the F.O.? He’s a friend of that dear Bennet Molyneux’s, to whom we’re both _devoted_.... _Such_ a grasp of African affairs, don’t you think so? My husband already knows Unguja through and through. I’m sure he’ll be glad to put you up to the ropes. I’ve never been there before. Spencer thought he ought to go out first and make a home for me, so I’ve been a forlorn grass widow for over a year. However, we shall soon be reunited. And I understand we’re to look on you as our chief till the Consul-General returns. Spencer’s been Sir James’s right-hand man. Thank you. Toast, please. No, I won’t take butter: it looks so odd. Like honey! Ugh!" After breakfast, Brentham escorted Lucy to the upper-deck, got her a folding chair and secured it in a sheltered corner, made her comfortable, lent her a novel and a rug, and then resumed his pacing of the deck or occasional study of a language book—he was trying, he told Lucy, to master Swahili by doing Steere’s exercises in that harmonious tongue. Mrs. Bazzard commandeered a steward and a deck-chair and established herself close to Lucy with a piece of showy embroidery, bought at Liberty’s with half the embroidery done. In a condescending manner she set herself to pump Lucy about Brentham.... Did she know him well? Didn’t she think him good-looking? Mrs. Bazzard thought of the two her husband was the finer-looking man. He had longer moustaches and they were a golden brown, like Mrs. Bazzard’s hair; he wasn’t perhaps _quite_ so tall; but _how_ she was looking forward to reunion with him. He was a paragon of husbands, one of the Norfolk Bazzards. His elder brother, a person of great legal acumen, had from time to time tendered advice of signal value to Mr. Bennet Molyneux.... It was thus they had got "in" with the Foreign Office, and if Mrs. Bazzard were not pledged to inviolable secrecy (because of Spencer’s career) there were things she knew and things she could tell about Lord Wiltshire’s intentions regarding Africa—and Spencer.... However.... Did Miss—she begged pardon—she had not caught Lucy’s name.... Josselin? any connexion of Sir Martin Josselin? Oh, _Josling_.... Did Miss Josling come from Captain Brentham’s part of the country? Not a relation? No, of course not.... Well, did she think him clever? Some—in the Foreign Office—regarded him as _superficial_. It was his good looks that had