“Be hanged if I do!”
“Be hanged, then; you probably will be,—for a spy, by excited Turks. Heigh-ho! I’m weary, dead weary, and virtue has gone out of me.” Dick dropped into a chair, and was fast asleep in a minute.
“That’s a bad sign,” said the Nilghai, in an undertone.
Torpenhow picked the pipe from the waistcoat where it was beginning to burn, and put a pillow behind the head. “We can’t help; we can’t help,” he said. “It’s a good ugly sort of old cocoanut, and I’m fond of it. There’s the scar of the wipe he got when he was cut over in the square.”
“Shouldn’t wonder if that has made him a trifle mad.”
“I should. He’s a most businesslike madman.”
Then Dick began to snore furiously.
“Oh, here, no affection can stand this sort of thing. Wake up, Dick, and go and sleep somewhere else, if you intend to make a noise about it.”
“When a cat has been out on the tiles all night,” said the Nilghai, in his beard, “I notice that she usually sleeps all day. This is natural history.”
Dick staggered away rubbing his eyes and yawning. In the night-watches he was overtaken with an idea, so simple and so luminous that he wondered he had never conceived it before. It was full of craft. He would seek Maisie on a week-day,—would suggest an excursion, and would take her by train to Fort Keeling, over the very ground that they two had trodden together ten years ago.