“Philip Alexander, otherwise ‘Alec.’”
“Got you. Now, girls, what do Nina and Madge stand for?”
He little guessed the explosive quality of that harmless question, but he did wonder why both Nina and Madge should blush furiously, and why their eyes should flash a species of appeal to Maseden.
Nina was the first to recover her composure.
“Nina and Madge should serve all ordinary purposes, C. K.,” she said with a rather nervous laugh.
“They’ll do fine,” agreed Sturgess. But he did not forget his own surprise—and the cause of it.
Maseden, quite unprepared for this verbal bombshell, plunged into generalities somewhat hurriedly.
“Barring the polar regions, the southern part of Chile is the wildest and least known part of the world,” he said. “It is extraordinary in the fact that every ship which sails to the west coast of both the Americas from Europe, and vice versâ, either passes it in the Pacific or winds among its islands for hundreds of miles along Smyth’s Channel; yet it remains, for the greater part, unexplored and almost uncharted. Darwin came here in the Beagle, and the sailor to-day depends on observations made during that voyage, taken nearly three-quarters of a century ago. Darwin’s Journal, and other of his works containing references to South America, shortened many an evening for me on the ranch.”
He paused a moment, before adding, in an explanatory way: