"Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, because I remember your names quite well, you see. And the birds and beasts and insects are in a box at my quarters. Come and get them."
"If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his small brown hand already in the larger one.
"We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival of the white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned guardian to say, with a tone and smile that won her instant suffrages: "I'm going to borrow these children for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest? I promise not to keep you long."
Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from lookout duty, and descending in quest of food from the Chief's particular eyrie on the roof of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the coffee-room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the upper end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across the fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional holes by the vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, meandered a marvellous procession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe, ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown, white-striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its back, a tsetse of appallingly gigantic size....
"Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with shining eyes of rapture fixed upon the glorious ones; "and is they weally my own, my vewy own, for good?"
"Yours and Berta's, really and for good."
"And won't you"—Hammy's magnificent effort at disinterestedness brought the tears into his eyes—"won't you want vem to play wif, ever yourself?"
The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula and tsetse, into the wooden box, and lifted the children from their chairs, as Captain Bingo and Beauvayse, following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with various versions of what had happened out there on the veld....
"I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run along with Berta now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."
Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy, in manly fashion, offered a hand—the left—the right arm being occupied with the box of toys. As Berta's little legs scampered through the door, he delayed to ask: