Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/244

 don't feel as if I could stand much waiting; the walk will take my mind off the pain, and I can have my wrist attended to the minute I get there."

Instantly Aunt Mary burst into a cataract of objections, and I only dammed the flood (quite in the proper sense of the word, because, like Marjorie Fleming, I was "most unusual calm; I did not give, a single damn") by suggesting that, once in Toulon, I might send back a comfortable carriage and engage rooms in a good hotel for us all for the night.

"Well, I can't and won't stay here alone, that's flat," pronounced my dear aunt; and despite all her lectures against "liberty, fraternity, and equality" in my treatment of poor Brown, she was willing to let me go unchaperoned save by him, for the sake of retaining Jimmy Payne's protecting presence herself. As for Jimmy, it was easy to see that he didn't like the idea at all; but he had jarred himself a good deal in his eccentric fall, and evidently funked another tramp. He had limped ostentatiously every step of the way to Le Beausset. Brown was afraid that I wasn't up to the walk, but I assured him it would be much less uncomfortable than indefinite waiting, and I think he saw by my face that I was right. After all our delay it was only half-past five when we set off, and would scarcely have been thoroughly dark if it hadn't been for the clouds which had been boiling up from the west all over the sky.

I had no idea what kind of a walk we were in for when we started, neither had Brown, for he had never been over exactly this part of the world either walking or driving, but only in the train. We hadn't