"If you don't mind," threatened Stanley, "I'll give away your hippo story."
"It has increased," said Ailsa's big, schoolboy husband, chuckling to himself.
"Impossible!..." ejaculated The Kid. "Surely it had already reached the limit of human ingenuity?"
They both spluttered, and Ailsa threw a newspaper at them, but Diana demanded to be told the story.
"O, it's only about a hippo in the Zambesi, above the Victoria Falls," began Stanley; "a perfectly harmless hippo really, but it had the impudence to look at the canoe in which Mrs. Grenville was travelling back to the hotel in the dusk."
"I thought it bumped the canoe up and down on its back," said the missionary, still chuckling.
"That came later"; and Stanley addressed himself gravely to Diana. "But at one time the story really did stop at the hippo chasing them on to an island and off it again, and opening and shutting its mouth at them."
"If you had been there you would have been terrified, and had hysterics or something," Ailsa flung at him.
"I certainly should at the later period of the story," he assured her.
"When it played catch-ball with them?" suggested the missionary. "Threw them all into the air and caught them again in the canoe."