"Of whom?" Mary said sleepily. They had met a good many people during the day, so the question was a pardonable one.
"Of whom! Why, of Mr. Jardine! Who else could it be?"
She lifted her arms about her head, and the loose white sleeves of her gown fell away from their roundness and softness.
"What a man!" she said, with a long sigh. "What a man! That is life, if you like. How tame the others seem beside him!"
"He roared very gently," said Mary, "but it was very exciting."
"Yes, wasn't it? That sail in the canoe down the river, with the jungle on each side of them alive with wild beasts and venomous reptiles, to say nothing of cannibals, and deadly sicknesses worse than any of those. He said so little about the danger. One got an impression of the extraordinary languorous beauty of the tropical vegetation; one smelt it, that African night, with its enormous moon beyond the mists. There was death on every side of him, in every breath he drew. He found what he went for, the antidote to the bite of the death's-head spider. Henceforth life in those latitudes will be robbed of one of its terrors. What a man!"
"It is a pity that we could not have heard him at the Royal Society," Mary said, with a little yawn—they had been keeping late hours. "If it had been a day or two earlier!"
"But I am going," said Lady Agatha. "Why, Mary, it is only to alter our arrangements by a day. Hazels—the dear place—will keep for a day longer."