"Finished spooning?" he asked, looking up as the younger man pulled out his chair and dropped heavily into it. To his surprise Matheson showed annoyance. "I only did what was civil," he answered shortly. "Hang it all! What else can a man do when he sees a girl bitten by a dog?" "What else? ... Save do as I did. I dare say it gave her pleasure." "I don't think it caused her emotion of any sort." The tone of the response did not invite a pursuance of the subject. Having in mind the speaker's run of ill luck, Holman found it easy to excuse his irritability. He went on unmoved with his lunch, and confined his conversational efforts to the baldest commonplace, evincing neither surprise nor resentment when no reply was vouchsafed to some of his remarks. Despite the fact that Matheson had sat down late he was the first to rise from the table. "What are you doing this afternoon?" the other asked. "Oh! I don't know... I shall loaf on the stoep, I think." Holman looked at him closely. "Loafing seems to agree with some people," he said, a trifle pointedly. "It's rather a favourite pastime of yours." "What of it?" asked Matheson impatiently. "Nothing. It is well if you can afford it. If you can't, it's imprudent." His hearer laughed. "You know about how well I can afford it," he said. "I am ready at any time to give you a chance of making good," Holman answered quickly. "Take a day off--loaf, if you feel that way-- to-morrow I will make you a proposal. I can't win so much off a friend. I don't like it." Matheson seemed about to make some reply, but, after a slight hesitation, finally answered nothing; he gave a brief nod as his sole response, and walked quickly out of the room. Holman did not immediately follow him. "There," he mused, looking reflectively after the retreating figure, "goes a useful man--a man who is too lazy to use his brains, and sufficiently a fool to allow others to adapt them to their own purposes. So long as there is need for a type, that type exists." Though such a possibility had not occurred to him at the moment of uttering them, his words had had considerable effect upon Matheson, who, stretching himself in a wicker lounge in the shade of the small stoep at the back of the hotel, farthest removed from the busy hum of the street, stared absently out upon the glaring sunlight and pondered over the implication that he was idling away the hours. It was not a new suggestion; but it had not struck him so forcibly before, perhaps because it had not before been brought so pointedly to his notice by another.