"And where have you come from?"
"Last from Kilsyth."
"Devil you have!" growled Sir Thomas Buffem, edging away. "They've had jungle-fever--not jungle, scarlet-fever there, haven't they?"
"O, ah, Duncan," said Clement Walkinshaw of the Foreign Office, "tell us all about that! It was awful, wasn't it? Towcester cut and run, didn't he? Mrs. Severn said he turned pea-green, and sent such a stunning caricature of him to her sister, who was staying at Claverton! We stuck it up in the smoking-room, and had no end fun about it."
"I'm glad you were so much amused. It wasn't no end fun for Miss Kilsyth, however, as she was nearly losing her life."
"Was she, by Jove!" said Walkinshaw, who was a "beauty boy," examining himself in the glass, and smoothing his little moustaches,--"was she, by Jove! What! our dear little Maddy?"
"Our dear little Maddy," said Duncan Forbes calmly, "if you are on sufficient terms of intimacy with the young lady to speak of her in that manner in a public room. I call her Miss Kilsyth; but then we were only brought up together as children, whereas you had the advantage of having been introduced to her last season, I think, Walkinshaw."
"That was a hot 'un for that d--d little despatch-box!" said Sir Thomas Buffem, as Walkinshaw walked off discomfited. "Serve him quite right--conceited little brute!"
"Well, but what was it, Duncan?" asked Lord Sumph. "It wasn't only the gal, heaps of people were down with it, eh?--regular hospital, and that kind of thing? I saw the Northallertons on their way south, and the duchess said it was awfully bad up there."
"The duchess is a--very nice person," said Forbes, checking himself, "and, like Sir Thomas here, an old soldier."