"Then, on her side, there was gratitude, for the colonel had given her a world of the sort of detail she wanted. She had cross-examined him like a K. C., and he had answered fully and freely out of the overflowing storehouse of his experience.
"If they could have gone on talking forever about that battle—I believe now it was Spion Kop—they might have been happy yet. But in time she pumped the cistern dry. There wasn't a crumb of fact or conjecture left in Darling's larder that hadn't been rolled over and over and stripped to its bare bones."
Young Andrews nearly howled. The mixture of figures was really superb.
"I fancy the pumping was pretty well finished before the wedding," the recital continued; "but I'm not stating that as a fact. You see that was quite six months after their meeting, and two years or more after Kneedrock's taking off. And in that six months they had seen each other, not continuously, but at intervals, for Darling was a very busy man.
"Their honeymoon, such as it was, was spent on a P. & O. steamer. I have been told that they each discovered their wretched mistake before they got to the Gulf of Aden. Take it for what it's worth.
"Conditions weren't all they might have been when they reached Umballa. That is certain. Darling did his best to hide the rift in the lute; but Nina never seemed to care a hang what people thought or said.
"Mind you, I'm not blaming her. I like the frankness of it. Not that she complained or whimpered. Not she. But she just went wild. Flirted like the very devil with anything and everything that came along.
"That was five years ago, mind you; and she hasn't mended her ways since. There are some who say she is possessed of the seven devils that the Lord cast out of Mary of Magdala, but—"
"It's a lie!" broke in young Andrews furiously. "She's—"
"Of course," Dinghal came back heartily. "I know that. She's not a bad woman. But I've heard her painted blacker than the Black Knight of the Black Lands.