“Awfully sorry, Mab, but I really can’t ride with you this morning. It’s bad enough when one of our wandering tribes comes in for a palaver, but to-day there are two of them, at daggers drawn with one another. They have both sent deputations to inform me that I am their father and their mother, and will I be good enough to pulverise the other lot? That means that I have a nice long day’s work cut out for me.”
“Oh, what a bother!” grumbled Mabel. “And Georgia has got a lot of dreadful women in the surgery, and is doctoring them all round. How can she bear to have them about? Do you like having an M.D. for a wife, Dick?”
“Personally,” said Dick solemnly, “I rather do; since Georgia is that M.D. Politically, it’s the making of me.”
“No; really?”
“Rather! Every woman of all these nomadic tribes has a stake in the country, so to speak—a personal interest in the maintenance of the system of government which has stuck Georgie and me down here. No Sarkar, no doctor; that’s the way they look at it.”
“Well,” said Mabel, somewhat ashamed, “if it wasn’t that I have my habit on, I would stay and help her. But we were going to try Laili, Dick, and you promised faithfully to come.”
“I know; it’s horribly rough on you. But I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll spare Anstruther to you for the morning, and he must ride out to me after lunch. Don’t break his neck first, mind.”
“But will it be safe for you to go alone? Aren’t you afraid?”
“Shade of my mighty father-in-law! afraid of what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It sounds the sort of thing——”