'Soon, and often,' was the answer. 'Remember we are colleagues.'

I went upstairs feeling extraordinarily comforted. I had a perfectly
beastly time ahead of me, but now it was all glorified and coloured
with the thought of the girl who had sung 'Cherry Ripe' in the
garden. I commended the wisdom of that old serpent Bullivant in
the choice of his intermediary, for I'm hanged if I would have
taken such orders from anyone else.



CHAPTER TWO
'The Village Named Morality'


UP on the high veld our rivers are apt to be strings of pools linked
by muddy trickles - the most stagnant kind of watercourse you
would look for in a day's journey. But presently they reach the
edge of the plateau and are tossed down into the flats in noble
ravines, and roll thereafter in full and sounding currents to the sea.
So with the story I am telling. It began in smooth reaches, as idle as
a mill-pond; yet the day soon came when I was in the grip of a
torrent, flung breathless from rock to rock by a destiny which I
could not control. But for the present I was in a backwater, no less
than the Garden City of Biggleswick, where Mr Cornelius Brand, a
South African gentleman visiting England on holiday, lodged in a
pair of rooms in the cottage of Mr Tancred jimson.

The house - or 'home' as they preferred to name it at Biggleswick
- was one of some two hundred others which ringed a pleasant