“That’s the worst of cého!” said Captain Lewin apologetically, as he filled another tumbler. “I say, Chum, what a sweet sight for the Administrator if he met us tottering home arm in arm!”
“Speak for yourself! I’ve had soda.”
“Oh, the day is yet young!” said Major Churton. “You may yet catch him up before tea, Mrs. Lewin!”
The whiskey and soda was finished, and Ally’s throat asked for another by the time that luncheon was on the table. It was a light meal, lightly relished, in a room that had more doors and windows than walls, and of which the heavy scented flowers and the strange fruits seemed as inevitably a part as the iced drinks. Chum had put Mr. Gregory on one side, and was talking to Major Churton consciously. He was a man who had been far and done hard things in strange lands, and she read the lines of it in his face, from the great square forehead to the self-reliant chin. It was not by any means a Sir Galahad type of face—Tristram or Lancelot’s failings were more likely branded there; but it was a soldier’s face for all that, and, despite the grey on his thick, clipped head, he looked what she had called him—a man who would be any woman’s master. Strength attracted Mrs. Lewin in whatever form she met with it; she ignored the talk at the other end of the table, which had drifted inevitably to stamps, and gave her attention to her host.
“I am bent on mastering the intricacies of the sugar industry,” she confided to him, while behind her shoulder she could hear Ally comparing the many different shades of the Grenada and Barbadoes star watermarked issues with Captain Gilderoy. “Is there a factory within my reach?”
“Denver’s is the best. You know Denver, don’t you? He was a great man in the old Company’s day, and is still on the Legislator. He has the largest plantation this side the Pass, and it joins your ground on one side. You ought to go over his factory, if you are really interested in native industries.”
“I wonder why you all find that so hard to understand? Ever since I arrived I have been met on all sides with weeping and lamentation, and because I do not join in it I am counted a fraud. Key Island seems a very possible centre of interest to me for the three years that one is stationed here.”
“Wait till you have done your three years!” said Bute Churton, as he handed her a cigarette. “I have had twenty years’ foreign service, Mrs. Lewin, and I never wish to see a palm-tree again once I get quit of this. Give me solid English comfort!”
“Most people’s idea of solid English comfort, and ‘Home, sweet home,’ consists in early Victorian furniture and all the meals an hour later on Sunday!” said Chum. “It gives me indigestion.”
“Oh, but that is the ‘Home, sweet home’ of one’s relations and old family friends—the sort of people that one only thinks about at Christmas and on their birthdays, in fact.”