“Why does he wear that great thick cap?” said Clare. “He’d look much better without it.”
“This?” said the old man, putting his hand to the cap of red knitted worsted, surmounted by a tuft, which adorned his head—as the remark was translated to him. “Whau! I am old and the nights are not warm.”
“Why, he’s got on two,” said Clare, as the movement, slightly displacing the red cap, showed another underneath made of like material but white. “Goodness! I wonder his head doesn’t split.”
“Native heads don’t split in a hurry, Miss Vidal,” said Orwell, the Resident Magistrate, who had joined them in time to catch the remark.
“I don’t believe I ought to speak to you, Mr Orwell—at any rate not just yet. You had no business to win that tent-pegging. I had backed Mr Lamont.”
The Magistrate laughed.
“Let me tell you, Miss Vidal, that you had backed the right man then. In fact it’s inconceivable to me how he missed that last time, unless the sense of his awful responsibility made him nervous. It would have made me so.”
Again, many a true word uttered in jest. The speaker little knew that he had stated what was literally and exactly the case.
“Nonsense. I wonder where Mr Lamont has got to. He hasn’t been near me since.”
“That I can quite believe. He’s afraid. I know I should be.”