Clarice seized the opportunity, and inquired after the prospects of his work in Matanga.

‘The place should do,’ said Drake.  ’The land’s good, there’s a river running through, and I have got picked men to settle on it; all English, that’s the point.  But you said generous.  I don’t see.’

Clarice switched him on the subject of English colonisation.  ’It’s necessary to have Englishmen to start it?  Why?’

‘Oh, well,’ said Drake.  ’It’s easy enough to see, if you can compare English with the foreign colonies.’  He rose from his chair and launched forth, walking about the room.  ’Look at the Germans!  There are seven hundred German colonists, all told, in the German colonies, and each of them costs the German tax-payer little short of eight hundred a year.  How many of them are in the English colonies?  And what’s the reason?  Why, they want to have the institutions of the Fatherland ready-made in five minutes.  They need the colonies made before they can prosper in it.  The French are better, but they are spoilt by officialdom.  The Englishman just adapts himself to the conditions, and sets to work to adapt the conditions to himself too.  He strikes a sort of mean, and the Home Government leaves him alone—­leaves him too much alone some say, and rightly, in cases.  There’s a distinction to be drawn, and it’s difficult to draw it so far away.  It’s this, when the colony’s made, then it isn’t a bad thing for the Government to keep a fairly tight hold on it.  But in the making it’s best left to itself; you can lay a cable between London and a colony too soon for the good of that colony.  There’s no fear of the colonist forgetting the mother country—­he may forget the Home Government, does at times, and then there’s a mistake or two.  But that’s the defect of the quality.’  He checked himself abruptly.  ’But I’m running away from what we were talking about.  Yes; I think we shall do all right in Matanga.’

‘You don’t mean to go back there yourself?’

’Not to live there.  To tell the truth, I think there’s a man or two wanted in England just now, who has had a practical experience of our colonies.’  Drake spoke without the least trace of boastfulness, but in a tone of quiet self-reliance, and Clarice had a thrill of intuition that he would not have said so much as that to any one but herself.

Clarice began to play again, this time a waltz tune.  Drake came over to the piano, and stood leaning upon the lid of it; he took up the ring and turned it over in his fingers.  She said thoughtfully: 

‘I suppose that’s true of men as well’; and then, with a hesitating correction, ‘I mean of men like you.’

‘What’s true?’

’Well, that they are best without—­help from any one—­that they stand in no need of it.’  She spoke quite seriously, with a note almost of regret.

‘Oh, I don’t know that,’ he answered, with a laugh.  ’It would be a rash thing to say.  Of course a man ought to depend upon himself.’