"You are a great woman, Madame," he murmured; "not even your cigarettes are in the least like anyone else's. Please give me another."
"Now," said Madame briskly, when the calm of deep narcotic satisfaction had smoothed out the lawyer's face, "I want to hear lots more. I am intrigued, and your story has got no farther than a thunderous beginning."
"It has gone no farther, as yet," said he, "and can go no farther until the half-caste savage of the Torres Straits learns of his monstrous heirship."
"So you travelled fifteen thousand miles in the crisis of war, when all men and women within reach of a newspaper thrilled with alternate hope and fear, just to look once at the Twenty-Eighth Baron Topsham and then to return. Months of hardship going out, and months more of hardship coming back. Just to look once without speaking. You are a remarkable man, Mr. Gatepath. I should, at least, have made his intimate acquaintance. He may be less of a savage Cannibal than he looks."
"I went to the hut of the Hon. Mrs. William Toppys," explained the lawyer. "It is, I am informed, a high-class hut, thatched on walls and roof with leaves of sago palm. No aristocrat of the South Seas had ever a finer or more luxurious residence. Yet it is a hut of one room in which the Hon. Mrs. William Toppys, her two daughters, and her son—known to the world of his little island as 'Willatopy'—live, eat, and sleep, the four of them indifferent to the most primitive dictates of decency. At the back is constructed a cookhouse. Neither edifice boasts a chimney. The Family have resided for years in this loathsome hovel unattended by the humblest of menials. The Right Honourable Lord Topsham"—driven by his legal conscience, Gatepath never withheld from the Heir his lawful title—"The Right Honourable Lord Topsham has not even a black footboy."
Madame gurgled. "He has small occasion for a valet, I expect."
Gatepath groaned. "A bootlace about his middle, and a few feathers stuck in his frizzy hair, seemed to constitute his entire toilet."
"It is evident," observed Madame, "that the late beachcomber, the Hon. William Toppys, was a very thorough artist. Having determined upon the simple life, he never looked back. His wife remained a native, his son and daughters were brought up in exact accordance with native model. We can dismiss the one living and sleeping room and the absence of menials as in no sense derogatory to the dignity of Toppys. Have you no worse to tell of the Family than that?"
Gatepath wriggled uneasily. "His Lordship," muttered he, after a blushing pause—Madame was privileged to see a lawyer blush—"did me the honour to prod me with his spear, in the middle of my back."
"Wherefor this outrage?"