Cold-blooded nerve, otherwise intrepid cheek, is a much admired quality in that land of bluffs and blagues called Rhodesia. Therefore, when Lundi Druro walked into Mrs. Hading's ballroom in his old grey lounge suit, with ruffled hair and the distrait eyes of a man dreaming of other things, and proceeded, in casual but masterly fashion, to detach his hostess from the tentacles of a new admirer, Wankelo silently awarded him the palm of palms. But no one who saw Mrs. Hading's face as she walked out of the ballroom by his side envied him his job of conciliation.

However, they could not know that her cold looks were for their benefit rather than Druro's. Banal upbraidings would not bring off the coup she had planned, and she did not intend to employ them. When she and Druro were out of earshot in a far corner of the veranda, the face she turned to him wore nothing on it but an expression of lovely and tender pain that he found much harder to contend with than anything she could possibly have said.

Contritely he proffered his profound apologies and regrets. But when all was said and done, it boiled down to the same old lame duck of an excuse that was yet the simple and shameful truth.

"I forgot all about it."

Like Gay under similar circumstances, she was infuriated by the combined flimsiness and sincerity of the plea. But, unlike Gay, she was too clever to give herself away and ruin her plans by an outburst of indignation. She only fixed her sad and lovely dark eyes on his and said quietly:

"Is that all you have to say to me, Lundi? With everyone laughing at my humiliation and disappointment—my foolishness!"

He flushed at the use of his name, the tone of her voice, the inference in her words.

"I am most frightfully sorry," he repeated, deeply embarrassed. "It was unutterably caddish of me. I can never forgive myself, or expect you to forgive me."

"I think you know by now that I can forgive you anything," she answered, in a low voice.

His embarrassment increased.

"I'm not worth a second thought from any woman," he asseverated firmly.

"But if I think you are?" There was a little break in her voice, and suddenly she put out her hands toward him. "If I cannot help——"

"Mrs. Hading," he interposed hastily, "you don't know what you are saying. I am a blackguard—a scamp, unfit to touch a woman's hand."

"Let me be judge of that," she said.

"I have not even told you everything about tonight. When you hear what has happened, you won't want to speak to me again." She suddenly took out a little lace handkerchief and began to cry. He stared at her with haggard eyes. "Do you know that I have killed a man tonight?" he said sombrely.

That gave her pause. Her nerves went taut and her face rigid behind the scrap of lace. Even her cold soul balked at murder, and her plans of mingled revenge and self-advancement rocked a little. She looked at him direct now, with eyes full of horrified enquiry.

"I did not mean to distress you with the story," he said. "But I struck a man over the card-table, and they say he is dead."

It seemed to her that she caught a sound of relief, even triumph in the statement—almost as though he was glad to have such a reason for stemming the tide of her words, and not taking the clinging hands she put out to him. Her keen mind was on the alert instantly. What was at the bottom of it all? Perhaps the man was not dead. Perhaps this was just a little trick of Druro's to slip the toils he felt closing round his liberty—her toils! Being a trickster herself, she easily suspected trickery in others. Rapidly she turned the thing over in her mind. She had no intention of involving herself with a man who had got to pay the penalty for committing a crime—but nothing simpler for her than to repudiate him if anything so unpleasant should really arise. On the other hand, in case he was juggling with the truth, she must establish a hold, a bond that, being a man of honour, he would not be able to repudiate. The situation called for the exercise of all the finesse of which she was mistress. She put away her handkerchief and looked at him gravely.

"There must be some dreadful mistake."

He shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.

"I don't think so." His manner inferred, "And I don't much care, either."

"But you must care," she said urgently. "You must fight it, Lundi. If you won't do it for your own sake"—she came a step nearer to him—"I ask you to do it for mine." He was staring moodily into the gloom of the night and the deeper gloom of his own soul. "To make up to me for the humiliation you have put upon me tonight," she said, almost in a whisper, "I think I have a right to claim so much."

That jerked him from his dreams. He looked her straight in the eyes.

"If anything I can say or do will make up to you for that, you will have no need to claim it," he said firmly, and, bowing over her hand, took his leave. People who saw him go thought he looked more haggard than when he came. But this was accounted for when, within the hour, news of the happenings at Glendora sped like wildfire through the town.

Before morning, however, there were certain hopeful tidings to mingle with the bad, and Marice Hading had cause to congratulate herself on her foresight in establishing her bond. Capperne was not dead. And there was hope of saving him. Half his teeth were knocked down his throat; in falling he had struck his head and cut it open; his heart, weakened by dissipation, had all but reached its last beat, and lung complication had set in. But the chances were that, being a worthless, useless life, precious to no one but himself, he would pull through and live to "sharp" another day. The doctors, at any rate, worked like tigers to insure this end. For there was no doubt that, if he died, the consequences must be extremely unpleasant for Druro. It was highly improbable that the latter would pay the penalty with his life, but a verdict of manslaughter against him could scarcely be avoided. He had struck Capperne down after a violent dispute in which the Australian, accused of sharping, had given him the lie, and Capperne's friends, the only witnesses of the fracas, were prepared, if Capperne died, to swear away Druro's life and liberty. As it was, they moved heaven and earth to have him put under arrest—"in case of accidents"—but their efforts were crowned with neither appreciation nor success, and Druro went about much as usual, careless, amusing, and apparently not unduly depressed. Still, it was a dark and doubtful period, and that his future hung precariously in the balance, he was very well aware, and so were his friends.

The only thing noticeably unusual in his habits was a certain avoidance of the Falcon Hotel and the society of womankind; and this, of course, was very well understood. It was natural that a man under a storm-cloud that might burst any moment and blot him out should wish to keep out of the range of women's emotional sympathy. Men's sympathy is of a different calibre. Even when it is a practical, living thing that can be felt and built on, it is often almost cold-bloodedly inarticulate and undemonstrative, which is the only kind of sympathy acceptable to a man in trouble, especially a man of Druro's type, who did not want to discuss the thing at all, but just to take what was coming to him with a stiff lip.

One good result of it all was that now, at last, his mine was getting a little attention. Once more he donned blue overalls and a black face and embroidered his pants with cyanide burns. And Emma Guthrie was content, or as content as Emma Guthrie could be. Rumour now said that crushing would be commenced on the mine in two months' time, and that ten stamps were to be added to the milling-plant already existing. This looked good for Druro's financial prospects, however gloomy his social ones might be. But he never talked. Emma Guthrie was the man who did all the bucking about the mine and its future. Rumour did the rest handsomely, and it was unanimously accorded that fate would be playing a shady trick indeed on Lundi Druro if, just when his future was painting itself in scarlet and gold with purple splashes, he was to be put out of the game by the death of a waster like Capperne.

On the day, then, that Capperne was at last pronounced to be out of the wood, there was almost general rejoicing in Wankelo. The little township threw its hat up into the air, and everyone burst into bubbles of relief and gaiety. In the club and hotels men valiantly "breasted the bar," vying with each other in the liquid celebration of Druro's triumph and the defeat of the enemy at Glendora, and all the women rushed to tea at the "Falcon" to discuss the news and, incidentally, to see how Mrs. Hading took it, and whether any further developments would now arise with regard to herself and Druro.

As soon as Mrs. Hading realized that Druro meant to absent himself from the felicity of her society during his period of uncertainty, she had thought out a pose for herself and assumed it like a glove. It was the pose of a woman who withdraws a little from the world to face her sorrows alone—or almost alone. A few admiring friends were admitted into her semi-devotional retreat. Mrs. Hallett was allowed to read to her awhile every day, and Berlie to arrange her flowers. Major Maturin brought her the English papers and any news that was going. A quiet game of bridge was sometimes indulged in, but Marice spent much of her time reading and writing, and a straight-backed chair with a cushion before it and a beautifully bound book of devotions lying on it hinted at deeper things. A certain drooping trick of the eyelids lent her an air of subdued sadness and courage that was attractive. A pose was always dearer to Marice Hading than bread, and this one gave her special pleasure—first, because it was becoming; secondly, because it was a restful way of getting through the hot weather, and, thirdly, because it conveyed to people the idea to which she wished to accustom them—that she and Druro were something to each other. She was no longer to be seen in the lounge. Having successfully impressed Mrs. Hallett with her sorrowful mien, that lady had placed her sitting-room, the only private one in the hotel, at Marice's disposal, and it was there, surrounded by flowers and books of verse, that she received the few friends she allowed to see her and wrote a daily letter of great charm and veiled tenderness to Druro. He nearly always responded with about three lines, making one note answer three letters, sometimes more. Druro was no fancy letter-writer. He could tell a woman he loved her, fervently enough, no doubt, either on or off paper, if the spirit moved him. But he never told Marice anything except that he was all right, and chirpy, and pretty busy at the mine, and hoped to see her one of these days when the horizon looked a little clearer. Brief and frank as were these missives, she studied them as closely as if they had been written in the hieroglyphics of some unknown language, and had often nearly bitten her underlip through by the time she reached the end of them.

With the growing conviction that Capperne would recover, her letters to Druro grew more intimate and perhaps a shade insistent on his over-sensitiveness in absenting himself for so long from the society of his best friends. It was natural that, when the good news was definitely confirmed, she should expect him to present himself, and perhaps that was why she came down to the lounge that day for tea, instead of having it served in the private sitting-room as usual.

She was looking radiant. The systematic rest-cure, combined with the services of her maid, a finished masseuse, had done wonders for her, and a gown of chiffon shaded like a bunch of pansies and so transparent that most of her could be seen through it successfully crowned her efforts.

Druro felt the old charm of lamp-posts stealing like a delicate, narcotizing perfume over his senses as he took her hand and listened to her soft murmurs of congratulation. After all, it is true that almost any woman can marry any man if she has a few looks, a few brains, and the quality of persistence. Besides, Marice had him safely bonded. The shrouded figure at the back of his mind that was waiting for some quiet hour in which to discuss the mess he was making of his life would have to be narcotized, too, or denied and driven forth.

Gay Liscannon came in with a riding party of noisy people, who clattered over, clamouring for tea and clapping Druro on the shoulder with blithe smiles. She gave him a friendly hand-clasp and said:

"Glad to see you're all right again, Lundi."

That was the spirit of all their welcomes. No one said openly: "Hooray! You're out of the jaws of the law." But they welcomed him like a long-lost brother turned up from the dead, and immediately began to talk about getting up some kind of "jolly" for him. It must be admitted that Rhodesians are always on the look-out for an excuse for a jolly, but this really seemed a reasonable occasion. They told him he looked gloomy and needed a jolly to cheer him up.

"A picnic is the thing for you," said Berlie Hallett, who loved this form of diversion better, even, than flirting. "Let us give him a picnic in his own district, Selukine."

A thoughtful look crossed Marice Hading's face.

"What about his own mine?" she said. "Can't we come and picnic there,
Lundi? I have never seen the Leopard."

The idea was ardently welcomed.

"Yes—the Leopard mine! We'll take our own champagne and baptize the new reef and Lundi's future fortunes. It shall be the great Leopard picnic—the greatest ever!"

It was furthermore suggested that, as there was a moon, it should be a moonlight picnic with a midnight supper at the mine.

Lundi was fain to submit, whether he liked, it or not. He wondered a little what Emma Guthrie would say at having the mine invaded, but personally he did not care a toss. The narcotizing spell had fallen suddenly from him again, and life and his future fortunes looked uninterestingly grey. He became aware of the shrouded figure tapping for attention at the back of his brain. Gay was the cause of it, somehow. He abruptly got up to go, saying he must get back to the mine.

"Emma will want some talking over before he will allow any picnicking around there," he said. "I think I had better go and start on him right away."

"Oh, don't go yet!" they cried, and Marice Hading looked at him chidingly. But he had no heart for their gay arrangements, and took himself off after finally hearing that the date was fixed for two nights later, all cars to be at the "Falcon" at eight o'clock in the evening and the start to be made from there.

Only a legitimate reason would have kept Gay away from a jolly given in Druro's honour. But she expected to have that reason in the indisposition of her father, who had been ailing for some time. She was not sorry, for she felt a shrinking from what the picnic might bring forth, just as she had felt on the night of Mrs. Hading's dance.

However, fate was not inclined to spare her anything that was due to her. Colonel Liscannon was so much better that he could easily be left, and, moreover, an old crony had come in from the country to spend a couple of days with him. So there was no chance of Gay's evasion without a seeming rudeness to Druro. But she was very late in arriving at the "Falcon," where she was to be a passenger in Tryon's car.

At the last, it was a matter of ordering something at the chemist's for her father and sending off a telegram that detained her, and she did not reach the hotel until nearly a quarter to nine. Long before she got there, she saw that all the cars were gone except one which she easily recognized as Tryon's.

"Dear old Dick! He is always to be relied on," she said, and had a half-finished thought that she would rather be with him that night than any one, except——

Then she went quickly into the lounge, where, no doubt, he would be waiting, and found him indeed, but sitting around a little table with coffee and liqueurs in the company of Druro and Mrs. Hading, the latter looking none too pleased.

"Ah," said she, with acerbity, as Gay came in, "at last! We were beginning to think you were never coming."

"But why did you wait for me?" inquired Gay, politely bewildered. "I thought Dick——"

"Some idiot has walked off with my car," explained Druro. "So Tryon is taking us all."

"And we are waiting for petrol as well as you," smiled Tryon; "so sit down." He put a chair for her next to Mrs. Hading, but that lady, after a swift glance into a mirror on the wall, skilfully manoeuvred her seat until she was opposite instead of next to the girl. Gay, in a little white frock of soft mull, with a cascade of lace falling below her long, young throat, resembled a freshly-gathered rose with all the fragrance and dewiness of the garden of Youth upon her. When Marice looked at her, she felt like a Borgia. She would have liked to press a cup of poison to the girl's curved red lips and force her to drink. In that glimpse in the mirror, she had seen that her own face, above a delicate shroudy scarf with long flying ends, rose like some tired hothouse orchid, beautiful still, but fading, paling, passing; and she hated Gay's youth and freshness with a poignant hatred that was like the piercing of a stiletto. She wondered why she had been such a fool as to wear that gown of purplish amethystine tulle tonight. It was a colour that made her face look hard and artificially tinted. True, her bare neck and shoulders, which were of a perfection rarely seen outside of an art gallery, showed at their best through the mazy shroudings, and her throat looked as if it had been modelled by some cunning Italian hand and sculptured in creamy alabaster. Her throat, indeed, was Marice Hading's great beauty, and her pride in it the most sinful of all her prides. She spent hours in her locked room massaging it and smoothing it with soft palms, working snowy creams into it, modelling it with her fine fingers, as though it were of some plastic material other than flesh and blood. She watched for the traces of time on it and fought them with the art and skill of a creature fighting for its life. Indeed, when a woman makes a god of her beauty, it is her life for which she is fighting in the unequal battle with time.

Night was naturally the time at which this reverenced beauty of hers shone most effectively to the dazzlement of women and the undoing of men. Day was not so kind. The South African sun is ruthless to exposed complexions, and has an unhappy way of showing up the presence of thick pastes and creams which have been worked into contours in danger of becoming salients. So, although Marice never wore a collar, but always had her gowns cut into a deep V both back and front, she invariably shrouded herself with filmy laces and chiffons. She drew these about her now and rose wearily. It seemed to her she had noticed Druro looking at Gay with some strange quality in his glance.

"If we don't make a move, we shall never get there at all," she said sharply.

Everything was going wrong tonight. Here she was stuck with two people whom she detested, after specially planning to make the drive alone with Druro!

"Come along; I expect the car is fixed up by now," said Tryon, and they all moved out. A black porter was patrolling the stoep.

"Has my boy been here with petrol for the car?" asked Tryon.

"Yas, sar."

"And filled it?"

"Yas, sar."

They approached to get in, and a fresh annoyance for Mrs. Hading arose.
Druro said casually:

"How are we going to sit?"

"You are driving, of course," stated Marice, in an authoritative tone.

"No," said Tryon dryly; "I never let any one handle my car but myself."

Now, nothing would make Marice renounce the comfort of the front seat. Even if she would have done it for the sake of sitting with Druro, she knew that the jarring and jolting so unavoidable on African roads would put her nerves on edge for the evening. So there was nothing further to be said, but she felt, as she flung herself into the seat beside Tryon, that this was verily the last straw. For a time she showed her displeasure with and disdain of Tryon by sitting half turned and conversing with Druro, who was obliged to lean forward uncomfortably to answer her remarks. But she soon tired of this, for the strong wind caused by the car cutting through the air tore her flatly arranged hair from its appointed place and blew it over her eyes in thin black strings. This enraged her, as the dishevelment of a carefully arranged coiffure always enrages a fashionable woman. She loathed wind at any time; it always aroused seven devils in her. She longed to box Tryon's ears. But the best she could do was to sit in haughty silence at his side, while the wind took the long ends of her scented tulle scarf and tore it to rags, fluttering them maliciously in the faces of the two silent ones behind. Every now and then Druro mechanically caught hold of these ends, crumpled them into a bunch, and stuffed them behind Mrs. Hading's shoulders, but a few minutes later they would be loose again, whipping the wind. Once, when he was catching the flickering things from Gay's face, his hand touched her cheek, and once, when they both put out their hands together, they clasped each other's fingers instead of the fragile stuff. But they never spoke. And their silence at last began to weigh on the two in front. They found themselves straining their ears to hear if those two would ever murmur a word to each other. And if they did not, why didn't they?

"Has he got his arm round her?" wondered Tryon savagely. (He too had counted on tonight and the long, lonely drive with Gay, and was in none too pleasant a mood with life.)

"Is he holding her hand?" thought Marice Hading, and ground her teeth.
"Has there ever been anything between them?"

But Druro and Gay were doing none of these things—only sitting very still, and thinking long, long thoughts. And whatever it was they thought of, it put no gladness into their eyes. Any one who could have peered into their faces in the pale moonlight must have been struck by the similarity in the expression of their eyes, the vague, staring misery of those who search the horizon vainly for something that will never be theirs, some lost city from which they are for ever exiled.

The African horizon was wonderfully beautiful that night. As they came out from the miles of bush which surround Wankelo into the hill-and-valley lands of Selukine, the moon burst in pearly splendour from her fleecy wrappings of cloud and showed long lines of silver-tipped hills and violet valleys, and, here and there, great open stretches of undulating space with a clear view across leagues and leagues to the very edge, it seemed, of the world. As one such great stretch of country rolled into view from a rise in the road, Druro spoke for the first time, in a low voice, vaguely and half to himself.

"There is the land I love—my country!"

With his hand he made a gesture that was like a salute. After all, he was a Rhodesian, and this was his confession of faith. The story of the lamp-posts was only a bluff put up to disguise the hook Africa had put in his heart, the hook by which she drags all those who love her back across the world, denying, reviling, forswearing her even unto seventy times seven, yet panting to be once more in her adored arms. All Rhodesians have this heart-wound, which opens and bleeds when they are away from their country, and only heals over in the sweet veld air.

Gay did not answer. He had hardly seemed to address the remark to her; yet it went home to her heart because she, too, was a Rhodesian, and this was the land she loved.

Suddenly they swept down once more into a tract of country thick with bush and tall, feathery trees. Here the rotting timbers of some old mine-head buildings and great mounds of thrown-up earth inked against the sky-line showed that man had been in these wilds, torn up the earth for its treasure, and passed on. Near the road an old iron house, that had once been a flourishing mine-hotel, was now almost hidden by a tangle of wild creepers and bush, with branches of trees thrusting their way through gaping doorways and windows.

"This was the old Guinea-Pig Camp. It is 'gone in' now, but once it was a great place—this old wilderness," said Tryon to Mrs. Hading, and misquoted Kipling.

"They used to call it a township once,
Gold-drives and main-reefs and rock-drills once,
Ladies and bridge-drives and band-stands once,
But now it is G. I."

He stopped, and the car having reached the foot of the hill that led out of the valley stopped, too, as if paralysed by its owner's efforts at parody. It had been jerking and bucking like a playful mustang for some time past, and behaving in an altogether curious manner, but now it was stiller than the dead. Tryon waggled the levers to no avail, then flung himself out of the car and got busy with the crank. Not a move. Druro then got out and had a go at the crank. No good. Thereafter, the two made a thorough examination of the beast, but poking and prying into all its secret places booted them nothing. As far as the eye of man could see, nothing was wrong with the thing but sheer obstinacy. It was more from habit than a spirit of inquiry that Druro finally gave a casual squint into the reservoir. Then the mischief was out. It was empty; the boy had never filled it. It was doubtful whether he had put in any petrol at all. The two men stared at each other aghast.

"Well, of all the rotten niggers in this rotten country!" breathed Tryon, at last, and, with the words, expressed all the weight of the white man's burden in Africa, mingled with rage at his present powerlessness to smite the evil-doer. Druro grinned. It was not his funeral, and, to the wise, no further words were necessary. But Mrs. Hading had not been long enough in Africa to be wise. This final calamity seemed all part and parcel of the mismanagement of the evening, and she did not care to conceal her annoyance.

"I cannot imagine any one but a fool allowing himself to be placed in such a predicament," she said, looking at Tryon with the utmost scorn.

He shrugged his shoulders, dumb with mortification. Druro, smiling with his usual native philosophy, now got his portion.

"Is there anything to do besides standing there smirking?" she inquired acridly.

"I should think we had better foot it to the Guinea-Pig." To do him justice, he had been thinking as well as smirking, but Marice was in no mood to be just. "A fellow called Burral lives there and has a telephone. He may have some petrol. All may not yet be lost!" He continued to smile. Not that he felt cheerful—but the situation seemed to him to call for derision rather than despair.

"Foot it? Do you mean walk through this wild bush? Good Heavens! How far is it?"

"Only about a mile or so, and there is quite a good path. Still, if you think it better to stay here in the car with Tryon while I go——"

"No; I'll go," said Tryon hastily.

"No you don't," persisted Druro. "I know the way better than you do." But Mrs. Hading put an end to the argument as to who should escape her recriminations.

"I refuse to be left in this wild spot with any one," she declared, and flung one last barb of hatred at Tryon. "How could you be such a fool?"

But Tryon's withers could be no further wrung. He merely felt sorry for Druro. The widow was showing herself to be no saint under affliction. Not here the bright companion on a weary road who is better than silken tents and horse-litters!

They started down the path to Burral's, Druro and Mrs. Hading ahead. Gay and Tryon following at a distance too short not to hear the widow's voice still engaged in acrid comment.

"What a fuss to make about nothing!" said Gay, a trifle disdainfully. "I'm afraid Africa won't suit her for long, if that's how she takes incidents of every-day life."

"I don't think she'll suit Africa," rejoined Tryon savagely. "Still, I'm not denying that I am a first-class fool to have trusted that infernal nigger. I could kick myself."

"Kick the nigger instead, tomorrow," laughed Gay, adding in the
Rhodesian spirit, "what does it matter, anyway?"

The path now became narrower and overhung with wandering branches and creepers. The brambles seemed to have a special penchant for Mrs. Hading's flying ends of tulle and lace, and she spent most of her time disengaging herself while Druro went ahead, pushing branches out of the way. Poor Marice! Her feet ached in their high-heeled shoes, and her French toilette was created for a salon and not out-of-door walking. Truly, she was no veld-woman. What came as a matter of course to Gay was a tragedy to her.

"How stupid! How utterly imbecile!" she muttered bitterly. "A hateful country—and idiots of men!"

"Cheer up!" said Druro, with an equability he did not feel. Nothing bored him more than bad temper. "We'll soon be dead—I mean, we'll soon be at Burral's."

"I find your cheerfulness slightly brutal," she remarked cuttingly, "and the thought of Burral's does not fill me with any delight."

"I'm sorry," he began, but his apology and the stillness of the night were both destroyed by a sudden loud crack of a rifle.

"By Jove! Who's that, I wonder?" exclaimed Druro. "There's nothing much to shoot about here." Then, to Mrs. Hading, "Stand still a minute—will you?—while I reconnoitre." He went a few yards ahead and gave a halloo. They all stood still, listening, until the call was returned in a man's voice from somewhere not far off. At the same time, a soft cracking of bushes was heard near at hand.

"It must be Burral out after a buck!" called out Tryon. He and Gay were still some way behind. Marice half-way between them, and Druro was apparently trying to disentangle her flickering, fluttering chiffons from a fresh engagement with the bushes when the terrible thing happened. The lithe, speckled body of a leopard came sailing, with a grace and swiftness indescribable, through the air and, leaping upon the fluttering figure, bore her to the ground. A scream of terror and anguish rent the night, and Gay and Tryon, galvanized by horror, powerless though they were to contend with the savage brute, rushed forward to the rescue. But Druro was there before them. They saw him stoop down and catch the huge cat by its hind legs, and, with extraordinary power, swing it high in the air. Snarling and spitting, it twisted its flexible body to attack him in turn, and, even as it went hurtling over his head into the bush behind, it reached out a paw and clawed him across the face. At the same moment, a man with a gun came crashing through the undergrowth, followed the flying body of the leopard into the bush, and with two rapid shots gave the beast its quietus. Reeking gun in hand, he returned to the party in the pathway.

"Got the brute at last," he panted. "Only wounded him the first shot; that's why he came for you people. My God! Who's hurt here?"

No one answered. Mrs. Hading lay moaning terribly on the ground, with
Tryon and Gay bending over her. Druro was stumbling about like a
drunken man. "Is it you, Lundi Druro? Did that devil get you, too?
Where are you hurt?"

"It's Burral, isn't it?" said Druro vaguely. "Yes; I got a flick across the eyes. Never mind me. Get that lady to your place, Burral, and telephone to Selukine. Tell them to send a car and a doctor and to drive like mad."

"My throat—oh, my throat!" keened Marice Hading. Tryon supported her. Gay was tearing her white skirt into strips and using them for bandages. Druro came stumbling over to them.

"For God's sake, get her to Burral's place, Dick!" said he. "Burral's wife is a nurse and will know what to do. Can you two fellows carry her? I would help you—but I can't see very well. I'll come on behind."

Gay helped to lift Marice into the two men's arms, and they went ahead with their moaning burden; then she came back to Druro, who was staggering vaguely along.

"Let me help you, Lundi. Lean on me."

He put out an arm, and she caught it and placed it around her shoulders.

"I can't see, Gay," he said, in a voice that was quite steady yet had in it some quality of terrible apprehension. She peered into his face. The moon had become obscured, but she could see that his eyes were wide open with torn lids. There was a great gash down his cheek.

"Come quickly!" she cried, her voice trembling with tears. "Oh, come quickly, Lundi! We must bathe and dress your wounds as soon as possible. Leopard wounds are terribly poisonous."

"All right," he said. "Sure you don't mind my leaning on you? I hope they get a doctor at once for Mrs. Hading."

They went forward slowly, he taking curiously uneven steps. She was tall, but he had to stoop a little to keep his hold on her.

"There hasn't been a leopard in these parts for nearly two years," he mused. "The last was shot on my mine the day we struck the reef—that is why we called it the Leopard. You remember, Gay? Do you think Mrs. Hading is badly wounded?"

"Her throat and chest are very much torn, but I don't think the wounds are deep."

"Poor woman! Good Lord; what bad luck!"

"Try and hurry, Lundi."

"But I can't see. Perhaps if I could wipe the blood out of my eyes,
Gay—where the deuce is my handkerchief?"

"Here is mine—let me do it for you. Sit down for a moment on this ant-heap."

She knelt by his side and gently wiped away the blood. By the sweat that was pouring down his face, she knew that he must be suffering intense pain, and was almost afraid to touch the wounded eyes.

"Is that better? Can you see now?" she asked fearfully.

"No," he said quietly. There was a moment of anguished silence between them, then he laughed.

"Cheerful if I am going to be blind!"

The words tore her heart in two, appealing to all that was tender and noble in her nature, and to that brooding maternal love that was almost stronger in her than lover's love. She seemed, as once before when trouble was on him, to see him as a bright-haired boy with innocent eyes, whom life had led astray, but who was ready with a laugh on his lips to face the worst fate would do. And she cried out, with a great cry, tenderly, brokenly:

"No, no, Lundi; you shall not be blind!"

She put her arms round him as if to ward off the powers of darkness and evil, and he let his bloody face rest against the soft sweetness of her breast. Leaning there, he knew he was home at last. Her warm tears, falling like gentle rain upon his wounded eyes, slipped down into his heart, into his very soul, cleansing it, washing away the shadows that had been between them. Now he knew what the shrouded figure at the back of his mind had waited for so long to say to him—that he loved this girl and should make his life worthy of her. He had always loved her, but had been too idle and careless, too fond of the ways and pleasures of men to change his life for her. Now that he held her in his arms, and could feel the blaze of her love burning through the walls of her, meeting the flame in his own heart, it was too late. Fate, with lightnings in her hand, had stepped between them, and a woman who held his promise intervened.

"Gay," he said gently, her name felt so sweet on his lips, "by a terrible mistake I have destroyed your happiness and mine. Forgive me."

"There is no question of forgiveness, Lundi," she whispered; "I will help you to stand by it."

He held up his blurred eyes and torn, bleeding lips, and she kissed him as one might kiss the dead, in exquisite renouncement and farewell. Only that the quick are not the dead—and cannot be treated as such. A more poignant misery waked in both their hearts with that kiss. He could not see her—that was terrible—but the satiny warmth of her mouth was so dear, so exquisitely dear! He suddenly remembered her as she was that night in her little rose-leaf gown with all the dewdrops twinkling on her. He wondered if he would ever see her again in all her beauty.

"You were so sweet that night of the dance, Gay," he said, "in your little pinky gown, with the dewdrops winking on you!"

She understood that he was wondering if he should ever see her again.

"You shall—you shall!" she cried. "Oh, hurry! Come quickly! Let us get to the house and to help."

The serene and careless philosophy characteristic of him came back.

"If I am to be blind, all right," he said quietly. "I'll accept it without a kick, because of this hour."

Once more they stumbled deviously and slowly on. A light showed nearer now, in a house window, and presently the other two men were on their way to meet them with lanterns and a brandy-flask. In a short time, Druro was established in Mrs. Burral's sitting-room, having his eyes bathed and bandaged by her skilful hands.

"What about Mrs. Hading?" had been his first question. Marice's low moans could be plainly heard from behind the curtain which divided the one room of the little iron house.

"Her throat and shoulders are very much lacerated," said Mrs. Burral. "I think we have avoided the danger of blood-poisoning for you both, as I was able to clean the wounds so quickly with bichloride. But she will be dreadfully scarred, poor thing! And you, Mr. Druro, I'm afraid—I'm afraid your eyes are badly hurt."

It seemed years to them all, though it was scarcely more than half an hour before assistance came from Selukine. All tragedies take place in the brain, it has been said, and poignant things were happening behind several foreheads during that bad half-hour of waiting. Marice Hading, lying on Mrs. Burral's bed, hovered over by that kind woman, was suffering more acutely in the thought of her ravaged beauty than from the pain of her wounds. Druro's bandaged eyes saw with greater clearness down the bleak avenues of the future than they had ever seen in health. Tryon was afraid to look at Gay. He was outwardly attentive to Burral's tale of the leopard's depredations—chickens torn from the roost, a mutilated foal, a half-eaten calf—and of the final stalking and unlucky wounding of the beast, rendering it mad with the rage to attack everything it met; but his brain was occupying itself with a thought that ran round and round in it like a squirrel in a cage—the thought that Gay was lost to him for ever. He had seen her looking at Lundi Druro with all her tortured soul in her eyes. Now she stood at the window, staring into the night.

When, at last, the whir of motor-wheels was heard on the far-off road, each of them hastened to recapture their wretched minds and drag them back from the lands of desolation in which they wandered, to face once more the formalities of life behind life's mask of convention. There came a sound of many voices—subdued, deploring, anxious, inquiring. The picnickers had heard of the accident and were returning in force to succour the lost ones. It was a sorry ending to the great Leopard picnic.

Mrs. Hading and Druro were driven to the Wankelo Hospital, and doctors and nurses closed in on them. Specialists came from Buluwayo and the Cape, and, after a time of waiting, it was known that the danger of blood-poisoning was past for both of the victims. But whether Lundi Druro was to walk in darkness for the rest of his days could not be so quickly told or what lay behind the significant silence concerning Mrs. Hading's injuries. It was known that her condition was not dangerous, but she saw no one, and, in the private ward she had engaged, she surrounded herself with nurses whose business it was not to talk, and doctors, even in Rhodesia, do not gratify the inquiries of the merely curious. So, for a long period of waiting, no one quite knew how the tragedy was all to end.

In another part of the hospital, Druro sat in his room with bandaged eyes and Toby on his knees, gossiping with the friends who came to beguile his monotony, giving no outward sign that hope had been dragged from his heart as effectively as light had been wiped from his eyes. From the black emptiness in which he sat, he sent Marice Hading a daily message containing all the elements of a mental cocktail—a jibe at fate, a fleer at leopards in general, and a prophecy of merrier times to come as soon as they were out of their present annoyances. In reply, she wrote guarded little notes (that were read to him by his nurse), making small mention of her own injuries but seeming feverishly anxious concerning his sight. All he could tell her was that he awaited the arrival and verdict of Sir Charles Tryon, the famous eye-specialist, now somewhere on his way between Madeira and Wankelo. It was Dick Tryon, who, knowing that his brother was taking a holiday at Madeira, had cabled asking for his services for Druro.

Poor Dick Tryon! He blamed himself bitterly for the whole catastrophe on the grounds that, if he had only looked into the petrol-tank instead of taking a Kafir's word, the car would never have been held up or the encounter with the leopard occurred. It was no use Lundi Druro's telling him that such reasoning manifested an arrogant underrating of the powers of destiny.

"You are a very clever fellow, Dick, but even you can't wash out the writing on the wall," philosophized the patient, from behind his bandage, "nor scribble anew on the tablet of Fate, which is hung round the neck of every man. If the old hag meant me to be blind, she'd fixed me all right without your assistance."

But Tryon could not be reasoned with in this wise. Perhaps it was the shipwreck in Gay's eyes that would not let him rest. Druro could not see that; but it was part of Dick Tryon's penance to witness it every day when he fetched Gay and her father in his car to visit the hospital. She always came laden with flowers and cheery words, and left an odour of happiness and hope behind her. But Tryon had seen what was in her eyes that night at Burral's, and behind all her hopeful smiling he saw it there still. He realized that she and Druro had found each other in the hour of tragedy, and that for him there was no rÔle left but that of spectator—unless he could prove himself a friend by helping them to each other's arms, in spite of Marice Hading. As for Druro and Gay, they had never been alone together since that night—and never meant to be. They had had their hour.

Another of Tryon's self-imposed jobs was to motor to Selukine and bring
back Emma Guthrie to see his partner. For there were moments when
Druro could stand no one's society so well as the bitter-tongued
American's.

"Go and bring in Emma to say a few pleasant words all round," he would enjoin, and Emma would come, looking like a wounded bear ready to eat up everything in sight. But, strange to say, after the first two or three visits, his words were sweeter than honey in the honeycomb, and all his ways were soothing and serene. He had nothing but good news to dispense. The novelty first amused then exasperated Druro, and he ended up by telling Guthrie to clear out of the hospital and never come back.

Emma did come back, however, and every time he showed his face, it was to bring some fresh tale of the sparkling fortunes hidden in the bosom of his Golconda. The mine was a brick, a peach, a flower. Zeus dropping nightly showers of gold upon DanaË was nothing to the miracles going on at the Leopard.

One evening after dinner, while Druro was sitting alone with his own dark thoughts, a message was brought to him—a message that Mrs. Hading would be glad to see him. It appeared that she had been up and about her room for some days, and was as bored as he with her own society.

Leaning on the arm of his nurse, he walked down the long veranda and came to her big, cool room, delicately shaded with rose lights and full of the scent of violets and faint Parisian essences. He could not see her of course, or the rose lights, but he sensed her sitting there in her long chair, looking languorous and subtle, with colours and flowers and books about her. The nurse guided him to a seat near her and left them together.

"Well, here we are, Lundi—turned into a pair of wretched, broken-down crocks!"

The words were light, but the indescribable bitterness of her voice struck at him painfully.

"Only for a little while," he said gently. "We'll both be back in the game soon, fitter than ever."

"Never!" There was the sound of a shudder in the exclamation. "How can one ever be the same after that——"

"You've been a brick! You mustn't give way now, after coming through so bravely."

"How I hate Africa!" she exclaimed fiercely.

Druro could not help smiling.

"Poor old Africa! We all abuse her like a pickpocket and cling to her like a mother."

"I don't cling. All I ask is never to see her again."

"I don't wonder. She has not treated you too well."

The smile faded from his lips, leaving them sombre. It was like looking into a dark window to see Lundi Druro's face without the gaiety of his eyes. At the same time, their absence threw up a quality of strength about his mouth and jaw that might have gone unobserved. He was conscious of her attention acutely fixed upon him, but he could not know with what avid curiosity she was searching his features, or guess, fortunately for him, at the cold, clear thought that was passing through her mind.

"How awful to have to drag a blind husband about the world! Still—the money will mitigate. I can always pay people to——" Then a thrill of pleasure shot through that bleak and desert thing which was her heart. "He will never see me as I am now."

Yes; this reflection actually gave her pleasure and content in Druro's tragedy. He, of all the world, would still think of her as she had been before the leopard puckered her throat and scarred her cheek with terrible scars. At the thought, her vanity, which was her soul, suddenly flowered forth again. Her voice softened; some of the old glamour came back into it.

"Will you take me away from this cruel country, Lundi—as soon as we are both better?"

To leave Africa, and that which Africa held! All Lundi Druro's blood called out, "No," but his firm lips answered gently:

"Yes; if you wish it," then closed again as if set in stone.

"And never come back to it again?"

"That is a harder thing to promise, Marice," he said. "One never knows what life and fate may demand of one. My work might call me back here."

"Yes, yes; that is true," she said peevishly. "The main thing is that you will never expect me to come back. But, of course, if you are blind, it will not be much use your coming either."

The blow was unexpected, but he did not flinch.

She was the first person who had taken such a probability for granted; but he had long faced the contingency himself.

"If I am to be blind, we must reconstruct plans and promises, Marice.
They are made, as far as I am concerned, conditionally."

"No; no conditions!" she cried feverishly. "I am going to marry you, whether your eyes recover or not. Promise me you won't draw back, if the worst comes?"

She could not bear to lose him—this one man in all the world who would still think her beautiful. All her soul which was her vanity cried out passionately to him.

"Of course I will promise you, dear, if you think it good enough," he said, "if you still want me and think a blind man can make you happy."

"Yes; I want you blind," she answered strangely. "You can make me very happy." Then she reached for the bell-button and pressed it. Her nerves were giving out, and she needed to be alone. But the future was arranged for now, and she could rest. She made a subtle sign to the entering nurse, and Druro never guessed that he was being evicted by any one but the latter in her professional capacity. To be deceived is doubtless part of the terrible fate of the blind.

She had succeeded in deceiving Druro in more than this. Confirmed now in the belief that he was necessary to her happiness and that to fulfil his promises to her was the only way of honour, he knew that he must thrust the thought of Gay out of his mind for ever. Even in the grey misery of that decision, he could still feel a glow of gratitude toward the woman who loved him enough to face the future with a blind man. Because his mind was a jumble of emotions fermented by the humility born of sitting in darkness and affliction, for many days he spoke a little of it to Tryon, who came, as was now his custom, to help pass away the evening. So Tryon was the first person in Wankelo to hear of Marice Hading's greatness of heart—and the last person in the world to believe in it. But he did not say so to Druro. He had long ago sized up Marice Hading's subtle mind and shallow soul, and it was not very difficult for him to read this riddle of new-born nobility. Druro and his rich mine were to pay the price of her lost beauty. What booted it if he were blind? So much the better for the vanity of a woman who worshipped her beauty as Mrs. Hading had done. It was certain that, blind or whole, she meant to hold Druro to his bond, and that she would eventually make hay with his life, Tryon had not the faintest doubt. Destruction for Druro—shipwreck for Gay! A woman's cruel, skilful little hands had crumpled up their happiness like so much waste paper, and Tryon, with the best will in the world, saw no clear way to save it from being pitched to the burning. The best he could do, for that evening at least, was to shake Druro's hand warmly at parting and tell him that he was a deuced lucky fellow.

Two days later, Sir Charles Tryon arrived, a short, square man with most unprofessional high spirits and a jolly laugh that filled everyone with hope. It was late in the afternoon when he got to Wankelo, and, after a cursory test of Druro's eyes, he announced himself unable to give a decisive verdict until after a more complete examination the following day. He then departed to his brother's house for dinner and a good night's rest after his long journey.

No sooner had Dick tucked him safely away than he was back again at the hospital, for he had a very shrewd notion of the brand of misery Druro, condemned to a night's suspense, would be suffering. And he guessed right. Emma Guthrie, just arrived, was in the act of "cheering him up" with an account of the mine's output from the monthly clean-up that day.

"How many ounces?" asked Druro indifferently. The prosperity of the mine bothered him far less than the fate of his eyes, for he knew himself to be one of those men who can always find gold. If one mine gave out, there were plenty of others.

"Five hundred, as usual," said Guthrie jubilantly. "Here it is—feel it; weigh it."

From a sagging coat pocket he abstracted what might, from its size and shape, have been a bar of soap but for the yellow shine of it, and placed it in Druro's right hand. The latter lifted it with a weighing gesture for a moment and handed it back.

"That's all right."

"All right! I should say!" declaimed the bright and bragful Emma. "Two thousand of the best there, all gay and golden! I tell you, Lundi, we've got a peach. And she hasn't done her best by a long chalk. She's only beginning. You buck up and get your eyes well, my boy, and come and see for yourself." He began to hold forth in technical terms that were Greek to Tryon concerning stopes, cross-cuts, foot-walls, stamps, and drills. Every moment his voice grew gayer and more ecstatic. He seemed drunk with success and unable to contain his bubbling, rapturous optimism, and that Druro sat brooding with the sinister silence of a volcano that might, at any instant, burst into violent eruption did not appear to disturb him. Fortunately, some other men came in and relieved the situation; when Guthrie took his leave, a few moments later, Tryon made a point of accompanying him to the gate. He was getting as sick as Druro of Emma's perpetual gaiety and came out with the distinct intention of saying so as rudely as possible.

"What do you mean by bringing your devilish good spirits here? Have you no bowels? Kindly chuck it for once and for all."

Guthrie, squatting on his haunches, feeling his bicycle tyres, turned up to him a face grown suddenly rutted and haggard as a Japanese gargoyle.

"That drum-and-fife band is only a bluff, Dick," he said quietly. "The Leopard is G. I., and if that boy loses his eyes as well, neither of us will ever climb out of the soup again."

Tryon came out of the gate and stared at him interestedly.

"What do you mean? How can the Leopard——"

"I mean that the reef is gone—for good, this time."

"The reef gone?" reiterated Tryon stupidly. "Why—good Lord, I thought you'd found it richer and stronger than ever!"

"So we did. But, my boy, mining is the biggest gamble in the world.
It pinched out, sudden as a stroke of apoplexy, a few days after
Lundi's accident. We've got a month's crushing in hand now, and when
that's gone, we'll have to shut down. We're bust!"

"But what about that five-hundred-ounce clean-up you handed him?"

"All bluff! I drew two thousand quid for native wages and threw it into the melting-pot. That lovely button goes back to the bank tomorrow. They've got to be bluffed, too, until Lundi's able to stand the truth."

"I don't know if he'll thank you for it, Emma," said Tryon, at last.

"I don't say he will; I don't say Lundi can't take his physic when he's got to, as well as any man. But I can reckon he's got an overdose already. I'll wait."

Tryon stared a while into the shrewd, wizened face, then said thoughtfully:

"I think you're quite right. There are moments when enough is too much, and I haven't a doubt but that a little extra bad luck would just finish what chance he has of seeing again. Keep it up your sleeve anyway, until we hear my brother's verdict."

"Oh, I'll keep it," said Emma grimly. "Once his bandages are off, we'll let the hornets buzz, but not before."

"Meantime," remarked Tryon, "if you like to make me a present of the information, I will promise to use it carefully and for nothing but Druro's benefit."

Guthrie gave him a long, expressionless glance.

"There are worse things than having your eyes clawed out by a leopard," continued Dick enigmatically.

"What worse?"

"You might, for instance, have your heart plucked out by a vulture while you're lying helpless."

"Poison the carcass!" Emma elegantly advised. "That'll finish the vulture before it has time to gorge full." And, as he straddled his battered bicycle, he added a significant remark, which showed that he very well knew what he was talking about. "Lundi'll always be blind about women, anyway."

Tryon did not return to Druro's room, but went thoughtfully toward that wing of the hospital in which he knew the quarters of the young and pretty matron to be situated. Having found her, he put before her so urgent and convincing an appeal for an interview with Mrs. Hading that she went herself to ask that lady to receive him. A clinching factor was an adroit remark about his brother's interest in Druro's chances. He guessed that such a remark repeated would bring him into Marice Hading's presence quicker than anything else, and he was right. Within five minutes, he was in the softly shaded, violet-scented room where Druro had groped his way some nights before—the difference being that he could see that which Druro had mercifully been spared.

The beauty of the woman sitting in the long chair had been torn from her like a veil behind which she had too long hidden her real self. Now that she was stripped, a naked thing in the wind, all eyes could see her deformities and read her cold and arid soul. The furies of rage and rancour were grabbling at her heart, even as the leopard had scrabbled on her face. It was not the mere disfigurement of the angry, purplish scars that twisted her mouth and puckered her cheeks. A shining spirit, gentle and brave in affliction might have transformed even these, robbing them of their hideousness. But here was one who had "thrown down every temple she had built," and whose dark eyes were empty now of anything except a malign and bitter ruin. It was as though nothing could longer cover and conceal her cynical dislike of all things but herself. The face set on the long, ravaged throat, once so subtly alluring, had turned hawklike and cruel. It seemed shrivelled, too, and, between the narrow linen bandages she still wore, it had the cunning malice of some bird of prey peering from a barred cage.

Tryon looked once, then kept his eyes to his boots. He would have given much to have fled, and, in truth, he had no stomach for his job. It seemed to him uncommonly like hitting at some wounded creature already smitten to death. But it was not for himself he was fighting. It was for Gay's sweet, upright soul, and the happiness of a man too good to be thrown to the vultures of a woman's greed and cruelty. That thought hardened his heart for the task he had in hand.

Marice came to the point at once. It seemed that, with her beauty, she had lost or discarded the habit of subtle attack.

"What does Sir Charles think of his chances?"

It was Tryon who had to have recourse to subtlety. Juggling with his brother's professional name was a risky business, and he did not mean to get on to dangerous ground.

"He can't tell yet—he was afraid to be certain, tonight—is going to have another go at them tomorrow. But——"

"But?" She leaned forward eagerly. "There is not much hope?"

There was no mistaking her face and voice. It was as he had guessed; she did not want Druro to recover. Tryon had no further qualms.

"I am not going to give up hope, anyway," he said, with that air of dogged intent which is often founded on hopelessness. She gave a little sigh and sat back among her cushions, like a woman who has taken a refreshing drink.

"Dear Druro, it is very sad for him!" said she complacently, and presently added, "but I shall always see that he is taken care of."

Something in Tryon shuddered, but outwardly he gave no sign, only looked at her commiseratingly.

"It is that we are thinking of—Guthrie and I. Are you strong enough physically and well-enough off financially to undertake such a burden?" She regarded him piercingly, a startled look in her eyes. "Doubtless you are a rich women—and, of course, no one could doubt your generosity. Still, a blind man without means of his own——"

"What?" She fired the word at him like a pistol-shot.

"He does not know," said Tryon softly. "We are keeping it dark for some days yet. The two shocks together might——" He paused.

"What—what?" she panted at him, like a runner at the end of his last lap.

"The mine is no good. They are dropping back into it every penny they ever made, and the reef has pinched out. Guthrie told me this tonight on his oath." The woman gave a long, sighing breath and lay back painfully in her chair. But Tryon had a cruel streak in him. He would not let her rest. "He is a ruined man, and may be a blind man, but, thank God, he has you to lean on!"

"You are mad!" said she, and burst into a harsh laugh. Tryon's face was full of grave concern as he rose.

"Shall I send your nurse?"

She pulled herself together sharply.

"Yes, yes; send her—but, before you go, promise me, Mr. Tryon, never to let Druro know you told me."

("Is it possible that she has so much grace in her?" he pondered.)

"Never!" he promised solemnly. "He shall find out the greatness of your love for himself."

Like fate, Tryon knew where to rub in the salt. As he went down the veranda, he heard the same harsh, cruel laugh ringing out, somewhat like the laugh of a hyena that has missed its prey.

After Sir Charles had gone, Druro sat for a while silent, elbows on the table, thinking. He had insisted upon getting up as usual, though they had tried to keep him in bed. He was not going to take it lying down, he said. So now he sat there, alone, except for Toby, who sat on his knee and, from time to time, put out a little red tongue and gently licked his master's ear.

The nurses who came softly in to congratulate him slipped away softlier still, without speaking. They could understand what it meant to him to know that he would see the sunshine again, the rose and primrose dawns, the great purple shadows of night flung across the veld. What they did not know was that, in spirit, he was looking his last on the land he loved and seeing down a vista of long years greyer than the veld on the greyest day of winter. His lips were firmly closed, but they wore a bluish tinge as he sat there, for he was tasting life colder than ice and drier than the dust of the desert between his teeth; and the serpent of remorse and regret was at his heart.

But not for long. Presently he rose and squared his shoulders, like a man settling his burden for a long march, and said quickly to himself some words he had once read, he knew not where.

"'A man shall endure such things as the stern women drew off the spindles for him at his birth.'"

His nurse, who had been waiting in the veranda, hearing his voice, now came in and greeted him gaily. "Hooray, Mr. Druro! Oh, you don't know how glad we all are! And the whole town has been here to wish you luck and joy on the news. But Sir Charles made us drive them all away. He says you may see no more than two people before you have lunched and rested, and he has selected the two himself."

"What cheek!" said Druro. "And what a nice soft hand you've got, nurse!"

"Be off with you now!" laughed the trim Irish nurse. "And how can I read you the letter I have for you with one hand?"

"Try it wid wan eye instid," said he, putting on a brogue to match her own. She laughed and escaped, and, later, read the letter, at his wish.

LUNDI DEAR:

I grieve to hurt you, but it is no use pretending. I can never live in this atrocious Africa, and I feel it would be cruel to tear you away from a country you love so much. Besides, after deep consideration, I find that my darling husband's memory is dearer to me than any living man can be. Forgive me—and farewell.

MARICE.

"She left by the morning's train," said the nurse. "You know she has been well enough to go for more than a week."

As Lundi did not answer, she went away and left him once more sitting very still. But with what a different stillness! The whole world smelled sweet in his nostrils and spoke of freedom. His blood chanted a paean of praise and hope to the sun and moon and stars. An old cry of the open surged in him.

"Life is sweet, brother! There is day and night, brother, both sweet things, sun, moon, and stars, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath!"

The voice of Tryon broke in on his communings.

"How do you feel, old man?"

"That you, Dick?" Druro stooped down and felt for Toby once more. "I feel inclined to run out into the street and throw my hat into the air, and yell out that I'll fight any one, play poker against any one, and match my girl and my dog against all comers."

"Indeed! Then I'll leave you, for you're certainly suffering from a dangerous swagger in the blood."

Tryon's smile had more than a tinge of sadness in it as he turned to go. This action of his was one of those that smell sweet and blossom in the dust, but, as yet, he was too near it to savour much more than its bitterness. The path is narrow and the gate is straight for those who serve faithfully at Love's high altar. As he went from the room, he looked with tender eyes at the flower-like girl who had come in with him and stood now with smiling lips and eyes full of tears looking at the man and the dog.

"You ought to give him a lecture, Gay. It isn't good for a man to be so puffed up with pride."

"Gay!" said Druro, standing up and letting Toby down with a rush.

"Yes, Lundi. Dick fetched me. I had to come and tell you how glad——"

She slid a hand into his, and he drew her into his arms and began to kiss her with those slow, still-lipped kisses that have all the meaning of life and love behind them.

Toby, having trotted out into the garden, now returned with a large stone which he had culled as one might gather a bouquet of flowers to present upon a triumphant occasion.

Rosanne Ozanne

PART I

Although the Ozannes kept an hotel in Kimberley, they were not of the class usually associated with hotel-running in rough mining-towns. It was merely that, on their arrival in the diamond fields, they had accepted such work as came to their hands, in a place where people like Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit were washing blue ground for diamonds in their own claims, and other men, afterward to become world-famous millionaires, were standing behind counters bartering with natives or serving drinks to miners.

John Ozanne, the honest but not brilliant son of an English clergyman, did not disdain to serve behind his own bar, either, when his barman was sick, and his wife, in servantless days, turned to in the hotel kitchen and cooked the meals, though such work was far from her taste and had not been included in her upbringing as a country doctor's daughter. In fact, the pair of them were of the stuff from which good colonials are made, and they deserved the luck that gradually came to them.

In time, the little hotel grew into a large and flourishing concern. John Ozanne was seen no more in his bar, and his wife retired into the privacy of her own wing of the building, though her capable hand was still felt in the hotel management. It was at this period that the little twin daughters were born to them, adding a fresh note of sweetness to the harmony that existed between the devoted and prosperous couple.

They were bonny, healthy children, and very pretty, though not at all alike—little Rosanne being very dusky, while Rosalie was fair as a lily. All went well with them until about a year after their birth, when Rosanne fell ill of a wasting sickness as inexplicable as it was deadly. Without rhyme or reason that doctors or mother could lay finger on, the little mite just grew thinner and more peevish day by day, and visibly faded under their eyes. Every imaginable thing was tried without result, and, at last, the doctors grown glum and the mother despairing were obliged to admit themselves beaten by the mysterious sickness.

Late one afternoon, Mrs. Ozanne, sitting in her bedroom, realized that the end was near. The child lay on her lap, a mere bundle of skin and bone, green in colour and scarcely breathing. The doctor had just left with a sad shake of his head and the conclusive words:

"Only a matter of an hour or so, Mrs. Ozanne. Try and bear up. You have the other little one left."

But what mother's heart could ever comfort its pain for the loss of one loved child by thinking of those that are left? Heavy tears fell down Mrs. Ozanne's cheek on to the small, wasted form. Her trouble seemed the more poignant in that she had to bear it alone, for her husband was away on a trip to the old country. She herself was sick, worn to a shadow from long nursing and watching. But even now there was no effort, physical or mental, that she would not have made to save the little life that had just been condemned. Her painful brooding was broken by the sound of a soft and languorous voice.

"Baby very sick, missis?"

The mother looked up and saw, in the doorway, the new cook who had been with them about a week, and of whom she knew little save that the woman was a Malay and named Rachel Bangat. There was nothing strange in her coming to the mistress's room to offer sympathy. In a South African household the servants take a vivid interest in all that goes on. "Yes," said the mother, dully. The woman crept nearer and looked down on the little face with its deathly green shadows.

"Baby going to die, missis," she said.

Mrs. Ozanne bowed her head. There was silence then. The mother, blind with tears, thought the woman had gone as quietly as she came, but presently the voice spoke again, almost caressingly.

"Missis sell baby to me for a farthing; baby not die."

The mother gave a jump, then dashed the tears from her eyes and stared at the speaker. In the dusky shadows of the doorway the woman, in her white turban and black-and-gold shawl, seemed suddenly to have assumed a fateful air. Yet she was an ordinary enough looking Malay, of stout, even course, build, with a broad, high cheek-boned face that wore the grave expression of her race. It was only her dark eyes, full of a sinister melancholy, that differed from any eyes Mrs. Ozanne had ever seen, making her shiver and clutch the baby to her breast.

"Go away out of here!" she said violently, and the woman went, without a word. But within half an hour the languorous voice was whispering once more from the shadow of the doorway.

"Missis sell baby to me for a farthing; baby get well."

The mother, crouching over the baby, straining her ears for its faltering heart-beats, had no words. In a sort of numb terror she waved the woman off. It was no more than fifteen minutes later that the Malay came again; yet it seemed to Mrs. Ozanne that she waited hours with cracking ear-drums to hear once more the terms of the strange bargain. This time, the words differed slightly.

"Missis sell baby to me for two years; baby belong all to me; missis no touch, no speak." In the dark palm she proffered lay a farthing. "Take it quick, missis; baby dying."

Sophia Ozanne cast one anguished glance at the face of her child, then gave it up, clutched the farthing and fell fainting to the floor.

An hour later, other servants came to relate that the baby was still alive and its breathing more regular. In another hour, they reported it sleeping peacefully. The heart-wrung mother, still weak and quivering from her collapse, crept through the hotel and came faltering to the kitchen threshold, but dared not enter. Near the fire, on a rough bed formed of two chairs and a folded blanket, the child lay sleeping. Even from the door she could see that its colour was better and the green shadows gone. The atmosphere of the kitchen was gently warm. Rachel Bangat, with her back to the door, was busy at the table cutting up vegetables. Without turning round, she softly addressed the mother.

"You keep away from here. If you not remember baby my baby for two years, something happen!"

That was all. But under the languor of the voice lay a dagger-like menace that struck to the mother's heart.

"Oh, I'll keep the bargain," she whispered fervently. "Only—be kind to my child, won't you?"

"Malays always kind to children," said Rachel Bangat impassively, and continued peeling vegetables.

It was true. All Malay women have a passion for children, and consider themselves afflicted if they have never borne a child. Illegitimate and unwanted babies will always find a home open to them in the Malay quarter of any South African town. The mother, comforted in some sort by the knowledge, stole away—and kept away.

Within two weeks the child was sitting up playing with its toes. Within a month it was toddling about the kitchen, though the little sister did not walk until some weeks later. The story got about Kimberley, much as Mrs. Ozanne tried to keep it secret. For one thing, the child's extraordinary recovery could not be hidden The doctor's amazement was not less than that of the friends who had watched the progress of the child's sickness and awaited its fatal termination. These, having come to condole, stayed to gape at the news that Rosanne was better and down in the kitchen with the cook. Later, Mrs. Ozanne's nurse appeared regularly in the Public Gardens with only one baby, where once she had perambulated two. Little Rosanne was never seen, and, indeed, never left the back premises of the hotel except on Sunday afternoons, when Rachel Bangat arrayed her in gaudy colours and took her away to the Malay Location. The child's health, instead of suffering, seemed to thrive under this treatment, and she was twice the size of her twin sister. Mrs. Ozanne had means of knowing, too, that, though Rosanne gambolled round in the dust like a little animal all day, she was well washed at night and put to sleep in a clean bed. That was some comfort to the poor mother in her wretchedness. She knew that Kimberley tongues were wagging busily and that, thanks to the servants, the story had leaked out and was public property. There were not wanting mothers to condemn her for what they variously termed her foolishness, ignorant supersitition, and heartlessness. But there were others who sympathized, saying that she had done well in a bad situation to trust to the healing gift some Malays are known to possess together with many other strange powers for good and evil. The doctor himself, after seeing little Rosanne with a pink flush in her cheeks, had said to her mother:

"It's a mystery to me—in fact, something very like a miracle. But, as it turns out, you did quite right to let the woman have the child. I should certainly advise you to leave it with her for a time."

Even if he had not so advised and had there been no sympathizers, in the face of all opposition Mrs. Ozanne would have stuck to her bargain. She knew not what dread fear for her child's safety lay shuddering in the depths of her heart, but this she knew: that nothing could make her defy that fear by breaking bond with Rachel Bangat.

Even her husband's anger, when he returned from England, could not make her contemplate such a step. She had written and told him all about the matter from beginning to end, describing the gamut of emotions through which she had passed—anxiety, suffering, terror, and dreadful relief; and he had sympathized and seemed to understand, even applauding her action since the sequel appeared so successful.

But, apparently, he had never fully realized the main fact of the bargain until he returned to find that, while one little daughter was dainty and sweet under a nursemaid's care, the other, dressed in the gaudy bandanas and bangles of a Malay child, gambolled in the back yard or crawled in the kitchen among potato peelings and pumpkin pips. First aghast, then furious, he brooded over the thing, held back by his terrified wife from making a move. Then, at the end of three days, he broke loose.

"It's an outrage!" he averred, and stamped to the back regions with his wife hanging to his arm trying to stay him. In the kitchen no sign of Rachel Bangat, but the child was sitting in a small, rough-deal sugar-box, which served for waste and scraps, using it as a go-cart. Amidst the debris of vegetable and fruit peelings, she sat gurgling and banging with a chunk of pumpkin, while the other chubby hand held a half-eaten apple. John Ozanne caught her up.

"Leave her, John; for God's sake, leave her!" pleaded his wife, white-faced. At her words a sound came from the scullery, and the cook bounded into the doorway and stood looking with a dark eye.

"You take my baby?" she asked. Perhaps it was the gentleness of her tone that made John Ozanne stop to explain that it was not fitting for an Englishman's child to be dragged up in a kitchen, and that the thing could not go on any longer.

"I quite understand that you've been very good, my woman, and I shall see that you are well re——"

"You take her; she be dead in twenty-four hours," said Rachel Bangat impassively. Her deep languorous voice seemed to stroke its hearers like a velvety hand, yet had in it some deadly quality. To John Ozanne, unimaginative man though he was, it was like hearing the click of a revolver in the hand of an enemy who is a dead shot. His grasp slackened round the child, and his wife took her from him and set her back in the box. They went out alone. Never again was an attempt made to break the two years' compact.

At the end of the allotted time, Mrs. Ozanne returned the farthing to the Malay, who received it in silence but with a strange and secret smile. Little Rosanne, healthy and strong, was taken into the bosom of her family, and John Ozanne, with scant ceremony or sentiment, paid Rachel Bangat handsomely for her services and dismissed her. Presumable the Malay Location swallowed her up, for she was seen no more at the hotel, and the whole strange episode was, to all outward appearance, finished.

These happenings having been overpast for some fifteen years, many changes had come, in the meantime, to the Ozanne family. The head of it—that good citizen, husband, and father, John Ozanne—after amassing a large fortune, had severed his connection with the hotel and retired to enjoy the fruits of his industry. Fate, however, had not permitted him to enjoy them long, for he was badly injured in a carriage accident and died shortly afterward, leaving everything to his wife and daughters. The latter, having enjoyed the advantages of education in England and France, were now returned to their mother's wing, and the three lived together in a large, cool stone residence which, pleasantly situated in Belgravia (even then the most fashionable part of Kimberley), was known as Tiptree House.

Both girls were extremely pretty, with all the bloom and grace of their eighteen years upon them, and moved in the best society the place afforded—a society which, if not more cultured, was at least more alive and interesting than that of the average English country town. For Kimberley continued to be the place where the most wonderful diamonds were to be picked out of the earth, as commonly as shells off the beach of a South Sea Island, and the adventurous and ambitious still circulated there in great numbers. There was no lack of gaiety and excitement, and the Ozanne girls joined in all that went on, and were extremely popular, though in different ways and for different reasons. Rosalie, blond, with a nature as sunny as her hair, and all her heart to be read in her frank, blue eyes, was beloved by her friends for her sympathy and sweetness; while the feelings that Rosanne excited were more in the nature of admiration and astonishment at her wit and fascination, and the verve with which she threw herself into life. She was always in demand for brilliant functions, which she made the more brilliant by her presence; but, though she had the art of attracting both men and women, she also possessed a genius for searing and wounding those who came too close, and she was not able to keep her friends as Rosalie did. Her dark beauty was touched with something wild and mysterious that repelled even while it charmed, and her ways were as subtle and strange as her looks. Indeed, though she lived under the same roof with her mother and sister, and to all outward appearance seemed to be one with them in their daily life and interests, she was really an exile in her own family, and all three were aware of the fact. Rosalie and Mrs. Ozanne, being single-hearted, simple people, were in complete accord with one another; but there was no real intimacy between them and Rosanne, and though they had (for love of the latter) tried for years to break down the intangible barrier that existed, all efforts were vain and usually resulted in pain to themselves. It was as though Rosanne dwelt within the fortified camp of herself, and only came glancing forth like a black arrow when she saw an opportunity to deal a wound.

Mrs. Ozanne, in brooding over the matter—as she often did—silently and sadly, assigned this secret antagonism in Rosanne to the strange episode of the girl's babyhood, and bitterly blamed the Malay woman for stealing her child's heart and changing her nature. Sometimes she actually went so far as to wonder if it would not have been better to have let Rosanne die than have made the uncanny bargain that had restored her to health. Once she had even pondered over the possibility of the Malay having tricked her by exchanging the real Rosanne for another child, but it was impossible to entertain such an idea long; Rosanne bore too strong a resemblance to her father's side of the family, and there were, besides, certain small birthmarks which no art could have imitated.

Still, indubitably a something existed in Rosanne that was foreign to her family. And the cruel streak in her character which betrayed itself in cutting comments, as bright as they were incisive, and tiny acts of witty malice were incomprehensible to her kindly-natured mother and sister. Furthermore, her hatred, when it was aroused, seemed to possess the mysterious quality of a curse. For instance, it appeared to be enough for her to give one dark glance at someone she intensely disliked or who had crossed her wishes, for that person to fall sick, or suffer accident or loss or some unexpected ill. Mrs. Ozanne had noticed it times out of number; in fact, she secretly kept a sort of black list of all the things that had happened to people who had been so unfortunate as to offend Rosanne. At first, it had seemed to the mother impossible that there could be anything in the thing, but the evidence had gradually mounted up until now it was almost overwhelming. Besides, Mrs. Ozanne was not alone in remarking it. Rosalie, too, knew, and conveyed her knowledge in round-about ways to her mother, for they would never speak openly of this strangeness in one they dearly loved. But it was through Rosalie that the mother heard that the same thing had gone on at school. There, the other girls had superstitiously but secretly named Rosanne "The Hoodoo Girl," because to have much to do with her always brought you bad luck, especially if you fell out with her. In fact, whenever you crossed her in any way, "something happened," the girls said.

"Something happen!" Those had been the Malay cook's words that had haunted and intimidated Mrs. Ozanne. And that was what it all amounted to. Rosanne had, in some way, acquired the power of her foster-mother for making things of an unpleasant nature happen to people she did not like. Kind-hearted Mrs. Ozanne, with mind always divided between stern conviction and a wish to deride it, suffered a mental trepidation that grew daily more unbearable, for what had been serious enough when Rosanne was younger began to be something perilously sinister now that she was turning into a woman and her deeper passions and emotions began to be aroused. In fact, the thing had come home to Mrs. Ozanne with renewed significance lately, and she was still trembling with apprehension over several strange happenings.

This was one of them: Pretty Mrs. Valpy, an intimate of the family, and by way of being one of the only two close friends Rosanne could boast, had fallen out with the latter at a ball where she was chaperoning the two girls. From a little misunderstanding about a dance, a serious quarrel had arisen. Rosanne, considering herself engaged for the seventh waltz to Major Satchwell, had kept it for him only to find that Mrs. Valpy, having in error written his name down for the same dance instead of the next, had kept him to it, with the result that Rosanne was obliged to "sit it out," a proceeding not at all agreeable to her as the best dancer in Kimberley. She had been in a fury, and, when the two came to her at the end of the dance, she did not disguise her annoyance. Major Satchwell apologized and explained the error away as best he could, knowing himself in the wrong for having been prevailed upon by Mrs. Valpy; but the latter aggravated the offence by laughing merrily over it and saying, with a touch of malice:

"After all, you know, Rosanne, I'm the married woman, and if there was a doubt I should have the benefit of it before a mere girl. Besides, I'm sure it did you good to see, for once, what it feels like to be a wall-flower."

Rosanne gave her a look that quenched her merriment, and, she declared, made her feel queer all the evening; and when, in the dressing-room later, she tried to make it up with Rosanne, she was coldly snubbed. She then angrily remarked that it was the last time she would chaperon a jealous and bad-tempered girl to a dance, and left the sisters to go home with another married friend.

The next day her prize Pom, which, because she had no child, she foolishly adored, disappeared and was never seen again; and a few days later her husband fell very ill of pneumonia. On the day of the biggest race-meeting of the season, he was not expected to live, and on the night of the club ball he had a serious relapse, so that Violet Valpy, who adored racing and dancing, missed both these important fixtures. In the meantime, Major Satchwell was thrown from his horse and broke a leg.

Of course it was foolish, even blasphemous, to point any connection between Rosanne and these things—Mrs. Ozanne said so to herself ten times an hour—but, in their procedure, there was such a striking similarity to all Rosanne's "quarrel-cases," that the poor woman could not help adding them to the black list. Just as she could not help observing that, after the three events, Rosanne cheered up wonderfully and came out of the gloomy abstraction which always enveloped her when she was suffering from annoyance at the hands of others and left her when the offence had been mysteriously expiated by the offenders. Mrs. Ozanne was indeed deeply troubled. The disappearance of the Pom was bad enough; but, after all, George Valpy had nearly died, while poor Everard Satchwell would limp for life. It had once been supposed that he and Rosanne were fond of each other and might make a match of it. Mrs. Ozanne herself had believed that the girl liked him more than a little; but evidently this was not so, or—the worried woman did not finish the thought, even in her own mind, which was now busy with further problems connected with her beautiful, dark daughter.

Rosanne had always shown a great love for jewels. As a child, coloured stones were most popular with her, but since she grew up she had transferred her passion to diamonds, and, though her mother pointed out that such jewels were not altogether suitable to a young girl, she had gradually acquired quite a number of them and wore them with extraordinary keenness of pleasure. Some she had obtained in exchange for jewels that had been gifts from her mother or birthday presents from old friends of the family, her devouring passion for the white, sparkling stones apparently burning up all sentimental values. Even a string of beautiful pearls—one of two necklaces John Ozanne had invested his first savings in for his twin daughters—had gone by the board in exchange for a couple of splendid single-stone rings. An emerald pendant that had come from Mrs. Ozanne's side of the family, and been given to Rosanne on her seventeenth birthday, had been parted with also, to the mother's intense chagrin, Rosanne having thrown it into a collection of jewels which she exchanged, with an additional sum of money, for a little neck-circlet of small but very perfect stones that was the surprise and envy of all her girl friends.

She possessed, also, a fine pendant and several brooches, and was, moreover, constantly adding to her stock. It was her mother's belief that most of her generous allowance of pocket-money went in this direction, and more than once she expostulated with her daughter on the subject. But, as may have been already guessed, Rosanne was not made of malleable clay, or the mother's hands of the iron that moulds destinies. So the strange, dark daughter continued to do as she chose in the matter of jewels and, indeed, every other matter.

Not the least of the reasons for Mrs. Ozanne's disapproval of her daughter's jewel transactions was the fact that they took the girl into all sorts of places and among odd, mean people. She was hand and glove with every Jew and Gentile diamond-dealer in the place, but she also knew a number of other dealers of whom reputable dealers took no cognizance, and who dwelt behind queer, dingy shops whose windows displayed little, and where business was carried on in some gloomy inner room. Certainly, Mrs. Ozanne neither guessed at the existence of such people nor her daughter's acquaintance with them. It was enough for the poor woman that the sight of Rosanne sauntering in and out of jeweller's shops, leaning over counters, peering at fine stones or holding them up to the light, was a well-known one in Kimberley, and that many people gossiped about the scandal of such proceedings and blamed Mrs. Ozanne for letting the headstrong girl do these things.

However, it was not the thought of people's criticism on this point that was now troubling Mrs. Ozanne, but a matter far more disquieting. She had begun to realize that Rosanne, though she had long since exchanged away all her earlier jewels for diamonds, was still increasing her stock of the latter in a way that could not possibly be accounted for by her dress allowance; for she was fond of clothes, and her reputation as the best-dressed girl in Kimberley cost heavily. But even if she had spent the whole year's allowance in lump at the jewellers', it would not have paid for the beautiful stones she had lately displayed.

On the night of the club ball, for instance, in a room packed with pretty women beautifully gowned and jewelled, Rosanne blazed forth, a radiant figure that put everyone else in the shade. In a particularly rare golden-red shade of orange tulle, her faultless shoulders quite bare, her long throat and small dark head superbly held and ablaze with jewels, she was a vision of fire. She looked like a single flame that had become detached from some great conflagration and was swaying and dancing through the world alone. She shone and sparkled and flickered, and was the cynosure of all eyes. Mrs. Ozanne had never been so proud of her—and so perturbed. For where had that new diamond spray of maidenhair fern come from, that shone so gloriously against the glossy bands and curls of dark hair; and whence the single stone, that, like a great dewdrop, hung on her breast, suspended by a platinum chain so fine as to be almost invisible? Other people were asking these questions also, and once the distracted mother, lingering in a cool corner of the balcony while her daughters were dancing, heard the voice of an acquaintance saying acidly:

"What a fool the mother is! She must be ruining herself to buy that girl diamonds to trick herself out in—like a peacock!"

Rosanne did not look like a peacock at all, but like fire and water made incarnate. The diamonds she wore seemed as much a part of her natural element as her hair and eyes and the tinted ivory flesh of her. Mrs. Ozanne knew it, and so did the speaker, who was also the mother of three plain daughters. But that did not bring balm to Sophia Ozanne's heart, or did it comfort her soul that Sir Denis Harlenden, the distinguished traveller and hunter, after some weeks of apparent dangling at Rosanne's heels, was now paying such open and unmistakable court that all other mothers could not but sit up and enviously take notice. Rosalie, too, it was plain, had a little hook in the heart of Richard Gardner, a promising young advocate and one of the best matches in Kimberley. But what booted it to Sophia Ozanne to triumph over other mothers when her mind was filled with forebodings and unhappy problems? She tried solving one of these on arriving home after the ball, but with no very great success.

In the dim-lit hall of Tiptree House—a lofty, pleasant room arranged as a lounge—they all lingered a few moments. Rosalie, with a dreaming look in her blue eyes, stood sipping a glass of hot milk. Rosanne had thrown off her white velvet cloak and flung herself and her crushed tulle into a great armchair. Mrs. Ozanne, with a cup of chocolate in her hand, looked old and weary—though in point of years she was still a young woman.

"Rosanne," she ventured, "a lot of people were remarking on your diamonds tonight."

"Yes?" said the girl carelessly. Her thoughts seemed elsewhere, and she did not look happy, in spite of the success that had been hers that evening.

"Yes; even Dick—" put in Rosalie timidly, then corrected herself—"even Mr. Gardner noticed them, and rather wondered, I think, how you came to be wearing such beautiful stones."

Rosanne sat up swiftly.

"Dick Gardner had better mind his own business," she said quickly, "or he will be sorry. I never liked that man."

Rosalie turned pale. Mrs. Ozanne braced herself to the defence of her gentle, little, fair daughter.

"But, my dear, it is not only Mr. Gardner; I heard many people saying things—that I must be ruining myself to buy you such jewels, and that——"

"Well, you're not, mother, are you?" Rosanne had risen and stood, smiling her subtle, ironical smile.

"No, dear, of course not; but I feel very uneasy, and I should like to know——"

"You need never feel uneasy about me, mother. I am well able to take care of myself and mind my own affairs"—she began to move out of the room—"and I also know how to deal with interfering people who try to mind them for me. Don't worry, mother dear, but go to bed. You look tired."

The door closed behind her. Rosalie threw herself into her mother's arms.

"Oh, mother, she meant that for Dick!" she cried, and burst into tears.
Mrs. Ozanne, trembling herself, strove to comfort her child.

"Nonsense, darling, she's only cross and tired. She did not mean anything. Besides, what can—" She faltered and broke off.

"What can't she do?" sobbed Rosalie. "And Dick did, he did say that everyone was amazed at her diamonds—and so they were."

"But what is all this about Dick, dear?" asked her mother, with a tender little smile. The subject was changed, as she meant it to be.

"Oh, mummie, we're engaged! I was only waiting for Rosanne to go to tell you; and I was so happy."

"And you will go on being happy, darling. He is a splendid fellow—and a good man, too. Nothing shall happen to prevent your being the happiest pair alive," comforted Mrs. Ozanne, and, with crooning, motherly words, herded Rosalie to bed. But she herself stayed sleepless for many hours.

"Rosanne," she said, at lunch the next day, before Rosalie came in, "I think you ought to know that your sister is engaged to Richard Gardner."

Rosanne started and stared at her mother in silence for a moment. It even seemed to Mrs. Ozanne that a little of the bright colour left her cheek.

"It happened last night, and he is coming to see me this afternoon."

Then Rosanne said a queer thing.

"I can't help that." Her face had a brooding, enigmatic look, and she seemed to be staring at her mother without seeing her. "I'm sorry, but I can't help it," she repeated slowly.

"Help it!" Mrs. Ozanne's eyes took on a haggard look. "What do you mean, dear?"

"Nothing," said the girl abruptly, and began to talk about something else as Rosalie came into the room. No more was said about the engagement, and Rosanne, after hurrying through her lunch and barely eating anything, jumped up and hurried away with the announcement that she was going down to Kitty Drummund's and would not be back to tea.

Kitty Drummund was that other close friend of whom mention has already been made. A young married woman, her husband was manager of one of the big compounds belonging to the De Beers Company. A compound is an enormous yard fenced with corrugated iron, inside which dwell several hundreds of natives employed down in the mines. These natives are kept inside the compounds for spells of three to six months, according to contract, and during that time are not allowed to stir out for any purpose whatsoever, except to go underground, the shaft-head being in the enclosure. At the end of their contracts, they are allowed to return to their kraals, after having been rigorously searched to make certain that they have no diamonds on them. Scores of white men are employed in the business of guarding, watching, and searching the natives, and it was over these men and, indirectly, over the natives, also, that Leonard Drummund was manager, his job obliging him and his wife to live far from the fashionable quarter of Kimberley.

Their house, in fact, though outside the compound, was close beside it and within the grounds of the company, being fenced off from the town by a high wire fence. The only entrance into this enclosure was an enormous iron gate through which all friends of the Drummunds or visitors to the compound had to pass, under the scrutinizing stare of the man on guard, who had also the right to challenge persons as to what business took them into the company's grounds. It was thus that De Beers guarded, and still do guard to this day, the diamond industry from thieves and pirates, and would-be members of the illicit diamond-buying trade.

Through this big gate, on the afternoon after the club ball, Rosanne passed unchallenged, as she was in the habit of doing four or five times a week, being well known to all the guards as a friend of Mrs. Drummund's. Many of the guards were acquaintances of hers, also, for, when they were not in the act of guarding, they were young men about town, qualifying for bigger positions in the company's employ. The young fellow on guard that day had danced with Rosanne the night before, and when she went through she gave him a smile and a friendly nod. He thought what a lovely, proud little face she had, and that that fellow Harlenden would be a lucky man to get her, even if he were a baronet.

Kitty Drummund, among cushions and flowers, behind the green blinds of her veranda, was waiting in a hammock for her friend. For a very happy reason she had been obliged to forego gaieties for a time; but her interest in them remained, and she was dying to hear all about the ball. Rosanne, however, seemed far from being in her usual vein of quips and quirks and bright, ironical sayings about the world in general. Indeed, her conversation was of the most desultory description, and Kitty gleaned little more news of her than she had already found in the morning newspaper. Between detached snatches of talk, the girl fell into long moments of moody silence, and even tea and cigarettes did not unknit her brow or loose her tongue. Kitty, who not only expected to be entertained about the dance but had also excellent reasons for supposing she should hear something very exciting and important about Rosanne herself, was vaguely troubled and disappointed. At last she ventured a gentle feeler.

"What about Sir Denis, Nan?"

Rosanne turned a thoughtful gaze on her, and this time a little of her old mockery glimmered in it.

"He still survives."

"Don't be silly, darling. Len heard this morning at the club—what everyone is saying—you know—how much he is in love with you, and that he's sure to propose soon."

"He proposed last night, Kit. We are engaged."

Kitty sat up with dancing eyes.

"And you've been keeping it back all this time! Oh, Rosanne, how could you? Such a darling man! You are lucky. What a lovely bride you'll make! You must put it off until I can come. Shall you be married in bright colours, as you always said you would? And you'll be Lady Harlenden!"

Kitty was not a snob, but titles didn't often come her way and she couldn't help taking a whole-hearted delight in the fact that Rosanne would have one.

"I shall never be Lady Harlenden. I don't mean to marry him, Kit."

"Don't mean to marry him!" Kitty Drummund's lips fell apart and all the dancing excitement went out of her eyes. She sat and stared. At last she said wonderingly but with conviction:

"But you care for him, Rosanne!"

"I know," said the other sombrely. "I love him. I love him, and I can't resist letting him know and taking his love for a little while. It is so wonderful. Oh, Kit, it is so wonderful! But I can never marry him. I am too wicked."

"Wicked!"

Kitty stared at her. The lovely dark face had become extraordinarily distorted and anguished, and seemed actually to age under Kitty's eyes. The girl put up her hands and pressed them to her temples.

"Oh, I am so unhappy," she muttered, "and I can't tell any one! Mother and Rosalie don't understand——"

Kitty Drummund was only frivolous on the surface. At core she was sound, a good woman and a loyal friend. She took the girl's hands.

"Tell me, dear," she said gravely; "I'll try and help."

But Rosanne shook her head. The agonized, tortured look passed slowly from her features, and her face became once more composed, though white as ashes. Her eyes were dull as burnt-out fires.

"I can't," she said heavily. "I can't tell any one; I don't even understand it myself."

She fell into silence again, but presently turned to Kit with a stern look, half commanding, half imploring.

"Swear you'll never tell any one what I've said, Kit—about the engagement or anything else."

Kitty promised solemnly.

"Not even Len," insisted Rosanne.

"Not even Len. But, oh, Nan, I shall pray that it will all come right!"

"Prayers are no good," said Rosanne, with abrupt bitterness. "God knows I've given them a fair chance!"

"Darling, one never knows when a prayer may be answered, but it will be—sometime."

Rosanne began suddenly to talk of something else, and the strange incident ended; for when Rosanne wished to drop a subject she dropped it, and put her foot on it in such a way that it could not be picked up again. Besides, this was scarcely one on which Kitty, however much she desired to help, could press her friend. So she did the wisest thing she could think of under the circumstances—made the girl go indoors to the piano and play to her. She knew that Rosanne gave, and was given to, by music in a way that is only possible to deep, inarticulate natures such as possess the musician's gift. One had only to listen to her music, thought Kitty, to know that there were depths in her that no woman would ever fathom, though a man might, some day. Denis Harlenden might—if she would let him.

Listening, as she lay in her hammock, to the wild, strange chords flung from under Rosanne's fingers, and again the plaintive, tender notes that stole out like wounded birds and fluttered away on broken wings to the sunlight, Kitty realized that she was an ear-witness to the interpretation of a soul's pain. Though she had never heard of Jean Paul Richter's plaint to music—"Thou speakest to me of those things which in all my endless days I have found not, nor shall find"—something of the torment embodied in those exquisitely bitter words came to her through Rosanne's music, and she was able to realize some tithe of what the girl was suffering.

Yet, in the end, Rosanne came out of the drawing-room with the shadows gone from her face and all the old mocking, glancing life back in it. If she had given of her torment to music, music, whether for good or ill, had restored to her the vivid and delicate power which made up her strangely forceful personality. She was hurriedly drawing on her gloves.

"I've just remembered the Chilvers' dinner-party tonight and must fly. You know how Molly Chilvers nags if one is late for her dull old banquets."

She kissed Kitty, tucked a rug round her, for the cool of evening was beginning to fall, and went her ways. But as she followed the path that led through the blue-ground heaps, past the iron compound, and down to the big gate, she was thinking that if Molly Chilvers' banquets were dull, the banquet of life was not, and it was the banquet of life she had put her lips to since she knew and loved Denis Harlenden. She was to meet him tonight! That thought had power enough to drive out the little snakes of despair and desolation that had been eating her heart all day. Let the morrows, with their pain of parting, take care of themselves! Today, it was good to be alive! That was her philosophy as she went, light-foot, through the blue-ground heaps.

There was no one about in the big outer enclosure. The monotonous chanting of Kafir songs came over the iron walls of the compound, the murmuring of many voices, clank of pot and pan, smell of fires, and the soft, regular beat of some drumlike native instrument. The day-shift boys had come up from the mines and were preparing their evening meal.

Passers-by were never supposed to go near to the walls of the compound, but in one place the path wound within a yard or two of it, and, as it happened, this spot was just out of eye-reach of the towers which stood at the four corners of the compound (unless the guards popped their heads out of the window, which they rarely did). True, the guard at the gate commanded a full view of the spot, but if he had been looking when Rosanne reached it, he would only have seen her stooping to tie up her shoe. He was not looking, however. It was not his custom, even though it might be his duty, to spy on Mrs. Drummund's visitors, especially such a visitor as Miss Ozanne. Therefore, no one saw that, when she had finished tying up her shoe, she leaned forward from the path and slid out her hand to a tiny mound of earth that lay near the compound wall—a little mound that might very well have been pushed up by a mole on the other side—dived her fingers into the earth, and withdrew a small package wrapped in a dirty rag. Then, swiftly she thrust something back into the earth, smoothed the little heap level, rose from tying her shoe, and lightly sauntered on her way. The next time she had occasion to use her handkerchief she slipped the little package into her pocket, and so, empty-handed except for her sunshade, she passed through the big gate.

At seven o'clock that evening, the carriage stood before the door of Tiptree House, waiting to convey the Ozanne family to the Chilvers' dinner-party, and Mrs. Ozanne, in black velvet and old lace, waited in the hall for her two daughters. She sat tapping with her fan upon a little Benares table before her, turning over in her mind, as she had been doing all the afternoon, two sentences from a letter Richard Gardner had sent her. It was an honourable and manly letter, putting forward his feelings for Rosalie and the fact that he had already asked her to be his wife. He had meant, he wrote, to call that afternoon on Mrs. Ozanne and ask verbally for her consent to the engagement, but something had happened to prevent his coming. However, he hoped, all being well, to call instead on the following day and put his position before Mrs. Ozanne.

"Something has happened!" "All being well!"—those were the phrases that repeated themselves in Sophia Ozanne's mind over and over again, rattling like two peas in an empty drum. It was on account of them that she had refrained from showing Rosalie the note; but her precaution was wasted, for the girl had also received a letter from her lover, and, curiously enough, it contained the two sentences which were so vividly present in Mrs. Ozanne's consciousness. Rosalie had repeated them to her mother at tea-time, and in the quiet drawing-room, as the two women sat looking at each other with apprehensive eyes across the teacups, the seemingly innocent words sounded strangely pregnant of trouble.

Perhaps that was why Rosalie looked less pretty than usual as she came in and joined her mother. Her white satin gown gave her a ghostly air, and the forget-me-not eyes had faint pink rims to them that were unbecoming. The mother had barely time to make these mental observations when Rosanne entered. To their surprise, she was still in her afternoon gown and hat.

"I'm not going to the Chilvers' tonight," she said rapidly. "I've already sent Molly a message, but please make her my further excuses, mother."

"But, my dear," exclaimed Mrs. Ozanne reproachfully, "you'll spoil her party! I think you ought to make an effort, even if you are late."

"Oh, no, mother; I can't. Besides, it was silly of her to give a party the night after a ball, when everyone is fagged out." She looked the picture of glowing health as she said it—more like some bright wild mountain-flower than a girl.

"I'm quite sure you are not so tired as either Rosalie or myself," pursued her mother warmly, "and I think that at least you might have let me know of your decision earlier."

"Yes, mother; I suppose I might, though I don't quite know what difference it would have made. I beg your pardon, anyway. But I don't see why you go, either, if you are tired. Rosalie looks dead beat." She was looking at her sister in an oddly tender way.

"Nothing wrong, I hope, Rosie?" she asked, in a voice so soft and appealing that Mrs. Ozanne would not have been astonished if the gentle and easily moved Rosalie had responded by pouring out her heart. But, instead, she turned away, biting a trembling lip, and put on her wraps without speaking. Rosanne shrugged her shoulders and went out of the room in her rapid, silent way.

"Mother, I feel I hate her!" Rosalie muttered, with burning eyes. Her mother was profoundly shocked.

"Oh, hush, my darling!" she whispered. "You don't know what you are saying."

Linking her arm in her daughter's, she led the way in silence to the carriage.

Rosanne, meanwhile, went into the dining-room and had something cold brought to her there by Maria, the old Cape cook. All the other servants were out for the evening, as was the rule on the rare occasions when the family did not entertain. Having dined, the girl went to her bedroom. The house was of the bungalow type—everything on the ground floor and no upper stories. All the bedrooms gave on to the great veranda that ran round the house, but Rosanne's room, being at the corner, had two French windows, one facing the front garden with a full view of the tennis-courts and drive, the other, shaded by creepers and a great tree-fern, looked out to the clustered trees and winding paths of the side gardens. It was from this door that Rosanne emerged, half an hour later, dressed in something so subtly night-coloured that she looked like a grey moth flickering through the trees of the garden. Softly she let herself out of the little side gate chiefly used by the servants, and, slipping from shadow to shadow in the dim lights of quiet back streets, she made her way toward the commercial part of the town. The main street—that same Du Toit's Pan Road where John Ozanne's hotel had once flourished—was brightly lighted by large arc-lamps, but never once did Rosanne come within range of these. It was in a dingy lane giving off from the big thoroughfare that she at last stopped before a shop whose shuttered window bore the legend—"Syke Ravenal: Jeweller." Upon an undistinguished looking side door she knocked gently, distinctly, three times. It opened as if by magic, and, like a shadow, she slipped into the darkness behind it.

Harlenden was a little early. Rosanne had said nine o'clock, and it wanted, perhaps, twenty minutes to the hour when he rang at Tiptree House and was told by Maria, after a few moments' waiting, that she could not find Miss Rosanne anywhere.

"Very well; I'll wait here," he said, and, lighting a cigar, sat down in one of the deep chairs in the dimly lighted veranda.

He was a lean, fair, well-groomed man, with a hard-cut face that told nothing. You had to make your own deductions from a pair of stone-grey eyes, a mouth close-lipped without being cold, and a manner not wanting in indications of arrogance that yet pleased by a certain careless grace and sureness. As Emerson says, "Do as you please, and you may do as you please, for, in the end, if you are consistent you will please the world." Perhaps it was his unfailing habit of following out this rule that made the world respect Denis Harlenden, even if it were not pleased with him. Certainly, his people would not be very pleased that he had chosen a Kimberley hotel-keeper's daughter to carry on the line of one of the oldest baronetcies in England. But, to speak with truth, he had given neither his people nor the Kimberley Hotel a thought in the matter. He loved Rosanne for her wit, her beauty, her courage, a certain sportsmanlike daring which showed in all her actions, and her unlikeness to any other woman he had ever known. Moreover, he was certain that she was the one woman who could keep his love without boring him. He, like Kitty Drummund, was aware of unfathomed depths in her, and he was not at all sure that he should like everything he found in those depths if he ever fathomed them. But, in any case, he preferred them to shallows. A shallow woman could not have kept Denis Harlenden's heart for a week—or a day. He also valued surprises, and Rosanne was full of surprises.

She gave him one now. At the sound of a slight, crushing of gravel underfoot, he had risen and stepped toward the end of the veranda, and, standing there beside the great tree-fern, he saw her coming from the side garden into the faint rays of light from the house. She had her two hands folded over her breast as though holding something precious there, and her face was rapt. He had never before seen her in that odd, sheathlike garment of silver-grey velvet. It gave her, he thought, with that brooding look on her face and her faintly smiling mouth, an air of moon-like mysteriousness. Almost as silently as a moonbeam, she slid into the veranda and would have passed on into her room but that he put his arms round her and drew her to his heart.

The thought had come over him suddenly to test her courage and coolness thus, and she did not disappoint him. For a moment he felt her heart fluttering like a wild bird against his; then she gave a little low laugh.

"Oh, Denis!" she whispered, against his lips. But when he let her go he saw that her face was white as milk.

"You were frightened, then?" he questioned.

"No, no; I knew at once it was you—by the scent of your dear coat." She stroked it with one hand, then made to move away, but he still held her. What had made her turn white, then, if she were not afraid?

"Let me go away and change my gown," she said, trying to edge away into the dark.

"But why? I love it. You are like a witch of the moon in it."

"No; it isn't a nice gown," she insisted childishly and still tried to escape, but he could be obstinate, too.

"I want you to keep it on—and, darling, darling, don't waste any of the moments we may be together! You told me yourself it could only be an hour."

She gave a deep sigh. It was true. Moments spent with him were too precious to waste. There might not be so many more. Still, she did not abandon her plan to get away from him to her room, if only for a minute. Gently she resisted his half-movement to lead her to a chair. He knew, by now, that she was holding something in her left hand which she did not wish him to see. They remained standing by the tree-fern, each will striving for supremacy. In the meantime, he went on speaking in his extraordinary charming voice that had power to make her heart ache with even the memory of its dear sound.

"Not that I can see why I should only have an hour."

"Mother will be back by ten," she said.

"Why shouldn't she know at once? I don't like this hole-and-corner business, Rosanne. It is not good enough for you." He kissed her on the lips, and added, "Or me."

Her face was in shadow, but his was not, and she could see that fires were lighted in the stone-grey eyes that banished all its masklike impassivity and brought a wonderful beauty into it. She stood trembling to his kiss and his voice and the magic of her love for him. Almost it seemed as if she must do as he wished. But she knew she must not. If her mother once knew, everyone would have to know, and how brutal that would be to him when she had to tell him that it must all come to an end, that she could not and would not marry him!

"You must let me tell her tonight," he was saying, with quiet firmness.

"No, no!" she faltered.

"Yes. And there is another thing; give me your left hand, Rosanne."

She did not give it so much as that he drew it from behind her. It was tightly clenched. Holding it in his own, he drew her to a chair at last. She seemed to have no more strength to resist. Then, sitting down before her, he gently unclenched one finger after another until what she had hidden there lay sparkling in the night. Almost as if it had been something evil, he shook it from her palm into her lap, and taking her hand to his lips, kissed it, then placed upon the third finger a ring.

"You must only like the jewels I give you, Rosanne," he said, with unveiled meaning.

They sat there for a long, aching, exquisitely silent moment, her hand in his, the great square emerald set in a wonderful filigree and scrolling of gold on her finger, the other thing gleaming with a baleful light between them. Then the spell broke with the roll of carriage wheels on the drive. A minute later, Mrs. Ozanne came into the veranda, Rosalie clinging to her arm. Harlenden was on his feet instantly, and, before Rosanne could intervene, had proffered his request to speak to her mother. The latter looked as much dazed by his words as his presence.

"Not tonight, Sir Denis, please."

"It is rather important," he pleaded, looking very boyish. But she seemed to notice nothing, and shook her head.

"Some other time—my poor Rosalie is ill—in trouble; she has heard some distressing news."

He drew back at once, apologizing, and a few minutes later was gone. Rosanne followed her mother and sister into the house, a strangely yearning, sorrowful look upon her face. Nothing was said. Rosalie seemed half-fainting, and her mother, still supporting her, led her to the door of her bedroom. They disappeared together. Rosanne stared after them, but made no attempt to help. When they had gone, she sat still in the hall, waiting. Sometimes she looked at the sparkling thing in her hand (she had caught it up from her lap when her mother came into the veranda), a slim, flexible string of diamonds for weaving in the hair—glowing and glimmering like spurts of flame imprisoned within frozen dewdrops. Sometimes she looked at the great emerald Denis Harlenden had set on her finger. But her eyes had something of the fixed, unseeing stare of the sleep-walker. At last Sophia Ozanne came back and stood beside her. Neither looked at the other.

"What is it mother?" she asked, in a low voice.

"Richard Gardner is very ill. They hoped it was only a sore throat that would soon yield to treatment; but he went to a specialist today—that Doctor Stratton who came out to see the Cape governor's throat—and he seems to think—" Poor Mrs. Ozanne halted and choked as if she herself were suffering from an affection of the throat. Rosanne still sat silent and brooding.

"He seems to think it is something malignant—and, in that case, he and poor Rosalie—" She broke down.

"Will never be able to marry, mother?" asked Rosanne, not curiously, only sadly, as if she knew already. Her mother nodded.

"Who told you?"

"Richard's brother was at the Chilvers'; he thought we had better know at once."

Mrs. Ozanne sat down by the little Benares table and, resting her face on her hands, began to cry quietly. Rosanne stared before her with an absorbed stare. She seemed in a very transport of grave thought. When Mrs. Ozanne at length raised her eyes for an almost furtive glance, she thought she had never seen anything so tragic as her daughter's face. Her own was working horribly with misery and some urgent necessity.

"Rosanne!" she stammered at last, afraid of the sound of her own words.
"Couldn't you do something?"

The girl removed her dark gaze from nothingness and transferred it to her mother's imploring, fearful eyes.

"Oh, mother!" she said quietly. "Oh, mother! I am more unhappy than you or Rosalie can ever be!"