"Not at all," said Evelina. "I'd rather have strawberries and cream."
"I think I should like diamonds best," said Mary. Whereupon Evelina suggested that her younger sister was a greedy little creature.
"As soon as you've got your fill of diamonds, which won't take more than six months longer," suggested Mr Hall, "you'll come back again?"
"Not exactly. I have an idea of going up the country across the Zambesi. I've a notion that I should like to make my way out somewhere in the Mediterranean,—Egypt, for instance, or Algiers."
"What!—across the equator? You'd never do that alive?"
"Things of that kind have been done. Stanley crossed the continent."
"But not from south to north. I don't believe in that. You had better remain at Kimberley and get more diamonds."
"He'd be with diamonds like the boy with the bacon," said the clergyman; "when prepared for another wish, he'd have more than he could eat."
"To tell the truth," said John Gordon, "I don't quite know what I should do. It would depend perhaps on what somebody else would join me in doing. My life was very lonely at Kimberley, and I do not love being alone."
"Then, why don't you take a wife?" said Montagu Blake, very loudly, as though he had hit the target right in the bull's-eye. He so spoke as to bring the conversation to an abrupt end. Mr Whittlestaff immediately looked conscious. He was a man who, on such an occasion, could not look otherwise than conscious. And the five girls, with all of whom the question of the loves of John Gordon and Mary Lawrie had been fully discussed, looked conscious. Mary Lawrie was painfully conscious; but endeavoured to hide it, not unsuccessfully. But in her endeavour she had to look unnaturally stern,—and was conscious, too, that she did that. Mr Hall, whose feelings of romance were not perhaps of the highest order, looked round on Mr Whittlestaff and Mary Lawrie. Montagu Blake felt that he had achieved a triumph. "Yes," said he, "if those are your feelings, why don't you take a wife?"