There was a discussion. Sir Oliver commended him. The great dependencies of the empire were the finest field in the world for a young man, provided he kept himself outside the radius of the venomous blight of the Colonial Office. To that atrophied branch of the imperial service the white administrator was merely a pigeon-holed automaton; the native, black or bronze or yellow, a lion-hearted human creature. All the murder, riot, rapine, arson, and other heterogeneous devilry that the latter cared to indulge in proceeded naturally from the noble indignation of his generous nature. If the sensible man who was appointed by the Government to rule over this scum of the planet called out the military and wiped out a few dozen of them for the greater glory and safety of the empire, the pusillanimous ineptitudes in second-rate purple and cheap linen of the Colonial Office, for the sake of currying favour with Labour members and Socialists and Radicals and Methodists and Anti-vivisectionists and Vegetarians and other miserable Little-Englanders, denounced him as a Turk, an assassin, a seventeenth-century Spanish _conquistador_ of the bloodiest type, and held him up to popular execration, and recalled him, and put him on a beggarly pension years before he had reached his age limit. He could tell them stories which seemed (and in truth deserved to be) incredible. “John,” said Lady Blount, “has heard all this a thousand times,”--as indeed he had,--“and must be sick to death of it. He is not going out to Australia as governor-general.” “Who said he was, my dear?” said Sir Oliver. “If you did n't imply it, you were talking nonsense, Oliver,” Lady Blount retorted. “Anyhow, Oliver, do you think John is taking a wise step?” Herold hastily interposed. “I do,” said he; “a very wise step.” “I don't agree with you at all,” said Lady Blount, with a snap of finality. “Your remark, my dear,” replied Sir Oliver, “does not impress me in the least. When did you ever agree with me?” “Never, my dear Oliver,” said Lady Blount, with the facial smile of the secretly hostile fencer. “And I thank Heaven for it. I may not be a brilliant woman, but I am endowed with common sense.” Sir Oliver looked at her for a moment, with lips parted, as if to speak; but finding nothing epigrammatic enough to say--and an epigram alone would have saved the situation--he planted a carefully cut cigar between the parted lips aforesaid, and deliberately struck a match. “Your idea, John,” said Lady Blount, aware of victory, “is preposterous. What would Stella do without you?” “Yes,” said Sir Oliver, after lighting his cigar; “Stella has to be considered before everything.” Risca frowned on the unblushing turncoat. Stella! Stella! Everything was Stella. Here were three ordinary, sane, grown-up people seriously putting forward the proposition that he had no right to go and mend his own broken life in his own fashion because he happened to be the favored playmate of a little invalid girl!