"I should like to take you out, the two of you," he said, "with a driver and a ball between you. I should like to see which of you would hit that sitting ball first, and how far!"
"We'll take you on to-morrow!" exclaimed Jack.
But the Home Secretary made no reply.
"I'm not keen," remarked Dalrymple. "It can't be a first-class game."
"You're hardly qualified to judge," snapped Sellwood, "since you've never played."
"Exactly why I am qualified. I'm not down with the disease."
"Then pray let us adopt the Duke's suggestion, and play a foursome to-morrow—like as we sit. Eh, Mr.—I beg your pardon, but I quite forget your name?"
"Dalrymple," replied the squatter; "and yours, once more?"
"Look in Whitaker," growled the Home Secretary, rising; and he left the table doubly angered by the weakness of his retort, where indeed it was weak to have replied at all.
Decidedly the squatter was no comfortable guest. Apart from his monstrous freedom of speech and action, which might pass perhaps on a bush station, but certainly not in an English country house, he was continually falling foul of somebody. Now it was the butler, now a fellow guest, and lastly a connection of his host, and one of Her Majesty's Ministers into the bargain. In each case, to be sure, the other side was primarily in the wrong. The butler was the worse for drink; the Parthenon man had indulged in gratuitous abuse of his friend; even Mr. Sellwood had taken amiss what was meant as pure chaff, and had been the first to begin the game of downright rudeness at which the old Australian had soon beaten him. Yet the fact remained that Dalrymple was the moving spirit in each unpleasantness; he had been a moving spirit since the moment he set foot in the house, and this was exactly what the other guests resented. But it was becoming painfully apparent that Jack himself would take nothing amiss; that he was constitutionally unable to regard Dalrymple in any other light than that of his old king, who could still do no wrong. And this being so, it was impossible for another to complain.