“A woman in it, no doubt,” he said. “Depend upon it, a woman in it.”
Caroline and Miss Gannett joined us at this minute. Miss Gannett drank coffee whilst Caroline got out the mah-jongg box and poured out the tiles upon the table.
“Washing the tiles,” said the colonel facetiously. “That’s right—washing the tiles, as we used to say in the Shanghai Club.”
It is the private opinion of both Caroline and myself that Colonel Carter has never been in the Shanghai Club in his life. More, that he has never been farther east than India, where he juggled with tins of bully beef and plum and apple jam during the Great War. But the colonel is determinedly military, and in King’s Abbot we permit people to indulge their little idiosyncrasies freely.
“Shall we begin?” said Caroline.
We sat round the table. For some five minutes there was complete silence, owing to the fact that there is tremendous secret competition amongst us as to who can build their wall quickest.
“Go on, James,” said Caroline at last. “You’re East Wind.”
I discarded a tile. A round or two proceeded, broken by the monotonous remarks of “Three Bamboos,” “Two Circles,” “Pung,” and frequently from Miss Gannett “Unpung,” owing to that lady’s habit of too hastily claiming tiles to which she had no right.
“I saw Flora Ackroyd this morning,” said Miss Gannett. “Pung—no—Unpung. I made a mistake.”
“Four Circles,” said Caroline. “Where did you see her?”
“She didn’t see me ,” said Miss Gannett, with that tremendous significance only to be met with in small villages.