Ford frowned. "Don't be miserable," he said, awkwardly. "I hate to think you 're unhappy. You know," he went on, more fluently as an argument opened out ahead of him, "you 've no business really to concern yourself with such things. You don't belong among them. You 're a bird of passage, just perching for a moment on your way through, and you mustn't eat the local worms. It 's poaching."
"There 's nothing else to eat," replied Margaret lugubriously.
"You should have brought your knitting," said Ford. "You really should! Capital thing for staying the pangs of hunger, knitting!"
"Thank you," said Margaret. "You 're very good. But I prefer worms. Not so cloying, you know!"
She did not, however, act upon Ford's suggestion to ask Fat Mary about the sub-inspector. Even as rats are said to afford the means of travel to the bacillus of bubonic plague, it is probable that the worms of a country furnish vehicles for native prejudices and habits of mind. At any rate, when Margaret surveyed Fat Mary, ballooning about the room and creased with gaiety, there came to her that sense of the impropriety of discussing a white man with her handmaid which is at the root of South African etiquette.
"Them flowers gone," announced Fat Mary tranquilly, when Margaret was in bed and she was preparing to depart.
"Gone! Where?" asked Margaret.
"I throw 'um away," was the contented answer. "Stink—pah! So I throw 'um. Goo' night, missis."
CHAPTER VIII
"Don't you some times feel," asked Margaret, "as though dullness had gone as far as it possibly can go, and something surprising simply must happen soon?"