Then the khaki-clad, sportsmanlike missionary strode in, and after the preliminary greetings Diana asked with charming piquancy, "O! are you really and truly a missionary?"
"Really and truly," he told her gaily, and came over to her side of the hut to sit beside her. "Why do you ask it like that?"
She considered a moment, and then declared impishly, "Because it doesn't seem possible that a man like you should never say 'Damn.'"
He laughed outright. "Well, I'm not going to tell tales out of school; but if you'd only got one pair of brown boots in the world and one pair of brown gaiters, and the boy tried to clean them with blacklead and paraffin oil!..."
Diana moved nearer to him, with her prettiest and most ingratiating air. "O, tell me some more!... Tell me lots more."
"I don't think that is half so bad as the boy washing the saucepans and the teacups all in the same water together," put in Mrs. Grenville.
"How perfectly delicious of him!" cried Diana. "What else did he do?"
"You ought to have been here this morning when our stores came out from Edwardstown," the missionary told her. "The boy carries them on his head, you know; and there was a tin of golden syrup ..."
"Yes ... yes ... and it leaked!..." gleefully.
"Trickled all down his head and neck; you never saw such a sticky mess! And as soon as the other boys discovered ..."