He did not choose, for reasons of his own, to ask Josane direct how imminent the danger might be. To do so would be ever so slightly to impair his own _prestige_. But in his own judgment he decided that the sooner they set their affairs in order against the coming storm the better. CHAPTER TWELVE. "AH, LOVE, BUT A DAY!" Pondering over what the old Kafir had said, Eustace busied himself over two or three odd jobs. Then, returning to the storeroom, he filled up a large measure of mealies and went to the house. "I'm going down to the ostrich camp, Eanswyth. Do you feel inclined to stroll that far, or are you too tired?" "Yes and no. I think it will do me good." Flinging on a wide straw hat she joined him in the doorway. The ostrich camp was only a couple of hundred yards from the house, and at sight of them the great birds came shambling down to the fence, the truculent male having laid aside his aggressive ferocity for the occasion, as he condescended, with sullen and lordly air, to allow himself to be fed, though even then the quarrelsome disposition of the creature would find vent every now and again in a savage hiss, accompanied by a sudden and treacherous kick aimed at his timid consort whenever the latter ventured within the very outskirts of the mealies thrown down. But no sooner had the last grain disappeared than the worst instincts of the aggressive bully were all to the fore again, and the huge biped, rearing himself up to his full height, his jetty coat and snowy wing-feathers making a brave show, challenged his benefactors forthwith, rolling his fiery eyes as though longing to behold them in front of him with no protecting fence between. "Of all the ungracious, not to say ungrateful, scoundrels disfiguring God's earth, I believe a cock ostrich is the very worst," remarked Eustace. "He is, if possible, worse in that line than the British loafer, for even the latter won't always open his Billingsgate upon you until he has fairly assimilated the gin with which your ill-judged dole `to save him from starving' has warmed his gullet. But this brute would willingly kick you into smithereens, while you were in the very act of feeding him." Eanswyth laughed. "What strange ideas you have got, Eustace. Now I wonder to how many people any such notion as that would have occurred." "Have I? I am often told so, so I suppose I must have. But the grand majority of people never think themselves, consequently when they happen upon anybody who does they gaze upon him with unmitigated astonishment as a strange and startling product of some unknown state of existence." "Thank you," retorted Eanswyth with a laugh. "That's a little hard on me. As I made the remark, of course I am included in the grand majority which doesn't think." "I have a very great mind to treat that observation with the silence it deserves. It is a ridiculous observation. Isn't it?"