Hash surveyed the paper closely.{21}

{21}

“That’s mutton gravy,” he said, pointing at the stain and forming a professional man’s swift diagnosis. “Beef wouldn’t be so dark.”

Sam regarded him with a glance of concentrated loathing which would have embarrassed a more sensitive man.

“I show you this lovely face, all aglow with youth and the joy of life,” he cried, “and all that seems to interest you is that some foul vandal, whose neck I should like to wring, has splashed his beastly dinner over it. Heavens, man, look at that girl! Have you ever seen such a girl?”

“She’s not bad.”

“Not bad! Can’t you see she’s simply marvellous?”

The photograph did, indeed, to a great extent justify Sam’s enthusiasm. It represented a girl in hunting costume, standing beside her horse. She was a trim, boyish-looking girl of about eighteen, slightly above the medium height; and she gazed out of the picture with clear, grave, steady eyes. At the corner of her mouth there was a little thoughtful droop. It was a pretty mouth; but Sam, who had made a study of the picture and considered himself the world’s leading authority upon it, was of opinion that it would look even prettier when smiling.

Under the photograph, in leaded capitals, ran the words:

 A FAIR DAUGHTER OF NIMROD. 

Beneath this poetical caption, it is to be presumed, there had originally been more definite information as{22} to the subject’s identity, but the coarse hand which had wrenched the page from its setting had unfortunately happened to tear off the remainder of the letterpress.

{22}

“Simply marvellous,” said Sam emotionally. “What’s that thing of Tennyson’s about a little English rosebud, she?”

“Tennyson? There was a feller when I was on the Sea Bird, called Pennyman——”

“Oh, shut up! Isn’t she a wonder, Hash! And what is more—fair, wouldn’t you say?”

Hash scratched his chin. He was a man who liked to think things over.

“Or dark,” he said.

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