“Well, and that is just what I have been doing,” she answered gaily. “There! Now I hope you feel duly flattered.”
“I do indeed,” I answered gravely.
“And I am so glad we have met like this,” she continued, “because now we shall be able to have a good long talk. The others are all more or less asleep, but I didn’t feel lazy, so came down here to reduce that row of stiff euphorbia to paper. I have taken up my drawing again, and there are delightful little bits for water-colour all round here.”
The spot was as secluded and delightful as one could wish. The high bank and overhanging bushes gave ample shade, and opposite, with the scarlet blossoms of a Kafir bean for foreground, rose a small cliff, its brow fringed with the organ pipe stems of a line of euphorbia.
“Lie down, Arlo,” she enjoined. “What a fortunate thing it was you were able to recover him. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Of course you don’t, because no question of thanking me comes in,” I said. “I would sooner have found him as we did, than make anything at all out of the trip, believe me.”
“And your trip was not a great success after all, Falkner tells us?”
“Oh we did well enough, though I have done better. But to return to Arlo. The mystery to me—to both of us—was how on earth he ever managed to let himself be stolen.”
“Ah. That dreadful witch doctor must have been at the bottom of it. I only know that one morning he—Arlo not Ukozi—had disappeared, and no inquiry of ours could get at the faintest trace of him. His disappearance, in fact, was as complete as that of that poor Mr Hensley.”
“Old Hensley hasn’t turned up again, then?” I said.