CHAPTER XV
M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR
Following Pine-breeze, who went before her like a fantastically colored glowworm, Campanula ascended to the house.
As she stepped onto the veranda she heard the voice of M’Gourley San addressing Lotus-bed, and asking when she thought Leslie San would be back. Mac’s elastic-side boots were in the veranda, and his gamp was propped against the wall.
He was sitting on the floor smoking a pipe and reading the Japan Mail through a pair of spectacles when Campanula entered.
Mac often came up of nights like this. He was a vivid Radical, and Leslie was a hide-bound Conservative, so they had a splendid time together when they got on politics; or they would play chess, or Mr. Initogo would drop in and they would have a rubber of dummy whist.
But what Mac really came for, though he scarcely knew it himself, was Campanula.
Campanula was a lot to Mac; much more than one can express in prose, and M’Gourley is scarcely the figure to make a ballad of. Yet the poem was there round about him, unsung, unuttered, unguessed by any one, least of all by himself.
When he had made chickens out of orange-pips for her at Nikko, she just as cunningly had made him her slave.