“But I don’t want to go, Hilary, and I won’t,” was the answer. “I’m not in the least afraid, and should hate the bother of moving just now.”
“Very well, please yourself. But don’t blame me if you do get a scare, that’s all.”
Heavens! what a cold-blooded devil this was, Justin Spence was thinking. If Hermia belonged to him, he would not treat a question of peril and alarm to her as a matter of no particular importance as this one was doing. He would insist upon her removing to a place of safety; and, unable to restrain himself, he said something to that effect. He did not, however, get much satisfaction. His host turned upon him a bland inscrutable face.
“Perhaps you’re right, Spence. I shouldn’t be surprised if you were,” was all the reply he obtained. For Hilary Blachland was not the man to allow other people to interfere in his private affairs.
“By the way, there are lions round here again,” said Hermia. “They were making a dreadful noise last night over in the kopjes. They seemed to have got in among a troop of baboons, and between the lions and the baboons the row was something appalling.”
“Quite sure they were lions?”
“Of course they were. Weren’t they, Justin?”
“No sort of mistake about that,” was the brisk reply.
“Well, I think they were lions too,” went on Blachland, “because the one I shot this morning might easily have been coming from this direction.”
“What?” cried Spence. “D’you mean to say you shot a lion this morning?”