The room was a common little sitting-room with a table in the centre, at either end of which sat Mrs. van Cannan and Mr. Saxby. Roddy was between the table and the wall, and Christine's first glance showed him white-faced and staring with fascinated, fearful eyes at a large cardboard box, with a flat-iron on its lid, which stood on the table. The two elder people were each holding small knobkerries, that is, stout sticks with wired handles and heavy heads made by the natives. A revolver lay at Saxby's elbow.

The little tableau remained stationary just long enough for Christine to observe all details; then everyone acted at once. Roddy flew round the table and reached her at the window, sobbing:

"Oh, Miss Chaine! Miss Chaine!"

Saxby laid his knobkerrie on the table and lit a cigarette, and Mrs. van Cannan, rising from her seat with an air of dignity outraged beyond all bounds, addressed Christine.

"What is the meaning of this intrusion, Miss Chaine? How dare you come bursting into Mr. Saxby's house like this?"

"I heard Roddy call out," was the firm answer, "and I consider it my duty to protect him." She had the boy well within her reach now, and could easily have lifted him out of the low window, but it seemed an undignified thing to do unless it became absolutely necessary.

"Protect him! From what, may I ask?" The woman's voice was like a knife.

"I don't know from what. I only know that he was in grave fear of something you were about to do."

Saxby interposed with a soft laugh.

"You surely cannot suppose Roddy was in any danger from his mother,
Miss Chaine—or that I would harm him?"

He certainly did not look very harmful with his full, handsome features and melancholy smile.

"Your action is both ridiculous and impertinent," continued Mrs. van Cannan furiously. "And I can tell you that I will not stand that sort of thing from any one in my house," she added, with the air of one dismissing a servant: "You may go. Roddy, come here!"

Roddy gave a wild cry.

"Don't leave me, Miss Chaine. They've got a snake in that box, and they want me to let it out."

There was blank silence for a moment; then Christine spoke with deliberation.

"If this is true, it is the most infamous thing I have ever heard."

Even Isabel van Cannan was silenced, and Saxby's deprecating smile passed. He said gravely:

"Mrs. van Cannan has a right to use what methods she thinks best to cure her boy of cowardice."

"Cowardice!" Christine answered him scornfully. "The word would be better applied to those who deliberately terrify a child. I am astonished at a man taking part in such a vile business."

She was pale with indignation and pity for the boy who trembled in her arms, and in no mood to choose her words.

Saxby shrugged his shoulders with a sort of helpless gesture toward his companion as if to say he had only done as he was told. Mrs. van Cannan gave him a furious glance before returning to Christine.

"Can't you see," she said violently, "that we have sticks here ready to kill the thing, and a revolver if necessary? Not that it is poisonous—if it had bitten that miserable little worm!" She cast a withering glance at Roddy. He shrank closer to Christine, who judged it time to pull him safely from the room to her side on to the veranda.

"There is nothing miserable about Roddy," she said fiercely, "except his misfortune in having a step-mother who neither loves nor understands him."

That blenched the woman at the table. She turned a curious yellow colour, and her golden-brown eyes appeared to perform an evolution in her head that, for a moment, showed nothing of them but the eyeball.

"That will do," she hissed, advancing menacingly upon Christine. "I always felt you were a spy. But you shall not stay prying here another day. Pack your things and go at once."

"Come, come, Mrs. van Cannan," interposed Saxby soothingly; "I am sure you are unjust to Miss Chaine. Besides, how can she go at once? There is nothing for her to travel by until the cart returns from Cradock."

But the woman he addressed had lost all control of herself.

"She goes tomorrow, cart or no cart!" she shouted, and struck one clenched fist on the other. "We will see who is mistress at Blue Aloes!"

Christine cast at her the look of a well-bred woman insulted by a brawling fishwife, and with Roddy's hand tightly in hers, walked out of the veranda without deigning to answer.

But though her mien was haughty as she walked away from Saxby's bungalow holding Roddy's hand, her spirits were at zero. She had burned her boats with a vengeance, and come out into the open to face an enemy who would stick at nothing, and who, apparently, had everyone at the farm at her side, including the big, good-natured-seeming Saxby.

It would be difficult to stay on at Blue Aloes and protect Roddy if his stepmother insisted on her departure, and she did not see how she was going to do it. She only knew that nothing and no one should budge her from the place. Something dogged in her upheld her from dismay and determined her to take a stand against the whole array of them. She was in the right, and it was her plain duty to do as Bernard van Cannan had besought, and not go until she could place Roddy in his father's hands with the full story of his persecutions.

"Tell me about it, Roddy," she said quietly, as they walked away. "Don't hide anything. You know that I love you and that your father has trusted you to my care."

"Yes," he assented eagerly; "but how did you know about my real mammie being dead?" His natural resilience had already helped him to surmount the terror just past, and he was almost himself again. "I wanted to tell you, but I had promised mamma not to tell any one."

It was as Christine had supposed. She explained her finding of the tombstone and the yellow rose, but not the rest of her terrible conclusions.

"I put it there," he said shyly. "She always loved yellow and red flowers. I was keeping the other two for her and Carol in the graveyard."

Christine squeezed the warm little hand, but continued her questions steadily.

"What happened after you had been to the outhouse?"

"Mamma was waiting for me on the stoep. She said she wanted me to come with her to see Mrs. Saxby." He added, with the sudden memory of surprise: "But we didn't see Mrs. Saxby. I wonder where she was."

The same wonder seized Christine. Where could the unhappy, distraught creature have been hiding while the trial of Roddy was in process?

"What happened then?"

"We just went into the sitting-room, and Mr. Saxby got the box and the knobkerries and his revolver, and mamma said, 'Now, Roddy, there is a snake in that box, and I want you to prove you are not a coward like last night by taking off the lid.'" He shuddered violently. "But I couldn't. Oh, Miss Chaine, am I a coward?" he pleaded.

"No, darling; you are not," she said emphatically. "Nobody in their senses would touch a box with a snake in it. It was very wrong to ask you to."

He looked at her gratefully.

"Then you opened the window. Oh, how glad I felt! It was just like as if God had sent you, for my heart felt as if it was calling out to you all the time. Perhaps you heard it and that made you come?"

"I did, Roddy," she said earnestly, "I ran all the way from the outhouse, because I felt you were in need of me."

They were nearly home when they saw Saltire and his boys close beside their path. Roddy was urgent to stop and talk, but Christine made the fact that heavy rain-drops were beginning to fall an excuse for hurrying on, and indeed in Saltire's face there was no invitation to linger, for, though he smiled at Roddy, Christine had never seen him so cold and forbidding-looking.

"He knows that I know," she thought, "and, base as he is, that disturbs him." The bitter thought brought her no consolation. She felt desolate and alone, like one lost in a desert, with a great task to accomplish and no friend in sight or sign in the skies. In the house, she collected the little girls, and they spent the rest of the afternoon together. The storm had broke suddenly, and the long-threatened rain came at last, lashing up the earth and battering on the window-panes amid deafening claps of thunder and a furious gale of wind.

When bath-time came for the children, Christine stayed with them until the last moment, superintending Meekie. She would have given worlds to avoid going in to dinner that night. No one could have desired food less, or the society of those with whom she must partake of it. Yet she felt that it would be a sign of weakness and a concession to the enemy if she stayed away, so she dressed as usual and went in to face the dreary performance of sitting an hour or so with people whom she held in fear as well as contempt, for she knew not from moment to moment what new offence she might have to meet. Only great firmness of spirit and her natural good breeding sustained her through that trying meal.

Saltire did not put in an appearance, for which small mercy she was fain to thank God. Deeply as he had wounded and offended her, she hated to see his face as she had seen it that afternoon. Mrs. van Cannan, oddly pallid but with burning eyes, absolutely ignored the presence of the governess, and her lead was followed by all save Andrew McNeil, who was no man's man but his own, and always treated the girl with genial friendliness. As a matter of fact, there was but little conversation, for the sound of the rain, swishing down on the roof and windows and tearing through the trees without, deadened the sound of voices, and everyone seemed distrait.

Christine was not the only one who finished her meal hurriedly. As she rose, asking to be excused, Mrs. van Cannan, rising too, detained her.

"I wish to make arrangements with you about your departure tomorrow, Miss Chaine," she said, loudly enough for everyone's hearing. "Kindly come to my room."

There was nothing to be gained by not complying. Christine did not mean to leave the next day, and this seemed a good opportunity for stating her reasons and intentions; she buckled on her moral armour as she followed the trailing pink-and-white draperies down the long passage, preparing for an encounter of steel on steel.

"Close the door," said Isabel van Cannan, and went straight to a table drawer, taking out a small bag full of money.

"I shall give you a month's salary instead of notice," she announced, counting out sovereigns, "though, as a matter of fact, I believe you are not entitled to it, considering the scandalous way you have behaved, plotting and spying and setting the children against me."

Christine disdained to answer this lying charge. She only said quietly:

"It is useless to offer me money, Mrs. van Cannan. I have no intention of leaving the farm until Mr. van Cannan returns."

"What do you mean? How dare you?" began the other, with a return of her loud and insolent manner.

"Don't shout," said Christine coldly. "You only degrade yourself and do not alarm me. I mean what I have said. Mr. van Cannan engaged me, and entrusted his children to my care, not only when I came but by letter since his departure. I do not mean to desert that trust or relegate it to any hands but his own."

"He never wrote to you. I don't believe a word of it."

"You are at liberty to believe what you choose. I have the proof, and shall produce it if necessary. In the meantime, please understand plainly that I do not intend to be parted from Roddy."

A baffled look passed over the other's features, but she laughed contemptuously.

"We shall see," she sneered. "Wait till tomorrow, and we shall see how much your proofs and protests avail you."

"As we both know each other's minds and intentions, there is no use in prolonging this very disagreeable interview," answered Christine calmly, and walked out.

The dining-room was silent and dim. The men had evidently braved the rain for the sake of getting early to their own quarters, and no one was about. In the nursery, the lamp by which she sometimes read or wrote at her own table had not been lighted. Only a sheltered candle on the wash-hand stand cast a dim shadow toward the three little white beds under their mosquito-nets. Meekie had gone, but the quiet breathing of the children came faintly to the girl as she sat down by her table, thankful for a little space of silence and solitude in which to collect her forces. She saw violent and vulgar scenes ahead. Mrs. van Cannan, now that her true colours were unmasked, and it was no longer worth while to play the soft, sleepy rÔle behind which she hid her fierce nature, would stick at nothing to get rid of Christine and set the whole world against her. Though the girl's resolution held firm, a dull despair filled her. How vile and cruel life could be! Friendship was a mockery; love, disillusion and ashes; nothing held sweet and true but the hearts of little children. An arid conclusion for a girl from whom the gods had not withdrawn those two surpassing and swiftly passing gifts—youth and beauty.

"To be a cynic at twenty-two!" she thought bitterly, and looked at her white, ringless hands. "I must have loved my kind even better than Chamfort, who said that no one who had loved his kind well could fail to be a misanthrope at forty. And I thought I had left it all behind in civilized England! Cruelty, falseness, treachery! But they are everywhere. Even here, on a South African farm in the heart of a desert, I find them in full bloom."

She bowed her head in her hands and strove for peace and forgetfulness, if for that night only. In the end, she found calmness at least, by reciting softly to herself the beautiful Latin words of her creed. Then she arose and took the candle in her hand for a final look at the children before she retired. The day had been terrible and full of surprises, but fate had reserved a last and staggering one for this hour. Roddy's bed was empty!

The shock of the discovery dazed her for a moment. It was too horrible to think that she had been sitting there all this time, wasting precious moments, while Roddy was—where? O God, where, and in what cruel hands on this night of fierce storm and stress? When was it that he had gone? Why had not Meekie been at her post as usual? She caught up the light and ran from the nursery into one room after another of the house.

All was silent. The servants were gone, the rooms empty. No sound but the pitiless battering of the rain without. At last she came to Isabel van Cannan's room and rapped sharply. There was no answer, and she made no bones about turning the door-handle, for this was no time for ceremony. But the bedroom, though brightly lighted, was empty. She did not enter, but stood in the doorway, searching with her eyes every corner and place that could conceivably hide a small boy. But there was no likely place. Even the bed stood high on tall brass legs, and its short white quilt showed that nothing could be hidden there. One object, however, that Christine Chaine had not sought forced itself upon her notice—an object that, even in her distress of mind, she had time to find extraordinary and unaccountable in this house of extraordinary and unaccountable things. On the dressing-table was a wig-stand of the kind to be seen in the window of a fashionable coiffeur. It had a stupid, waxen face, and on its head was arranged a wig of blond curly hair with long golden plaits hanging down on each side, even as the plaits of Isabel van Cannan hung about her shoulders as she lay among her pillows every morning. The thing gave Christine a thrill such as all the horrors of that day had not caused her. So innocent, yet so sinister, perched there above the foolish, waxen features, it seemed symbolical of the woman who hid cruel and terrible things behind her babylike airs and sleepy laughter.

Atop of these thoughts came the woman herself, emerging en dÉshabillÉ from her adjoining bathroom. The moment she saw Christine, she flung a towel across her head, but too late for her purpose. The girl had seen the short, crisp, almost snowy curls that were hidden by day under the golden wig, and realized in an instant that she was in the presence of a woman of a breed she had never known—mulatto, albino, or some strange admixture of native and European blood. The golden hair, assisted by artificial aids to the complexion, and her large golden-brown eyes had lent an extraordinary blondness to the skin. But the moment the wig was off, the mischief was out. The thickness of eyelids and nostril, and a certain cruel, sensuous fulness of the lips and jaw told the dark tale, and Christine wondered how she could ever have been taken in, except that the woman before her was as clever as she was cruel and unscrupulous. A tingling horror stole through her veins as she stood there, sustaining a malignant glance and listening dumfounded to an insolent inquiry as to what further spying she had come to do.

"I beg your pardon," she stammered. "I knocked, and, getting no answer, opened the door, hardly knowing what I did in my distress. Roddy is missing from his bed, and I don't know where to look for him."

The other had turned away for a moment, adjusting the covering on her head before a mirror. She may still have believed that her secret remained unrevealed.

"I haven't the faintest notion of Roddy's whereabouts," she said, "and if he is lost out in this storm, perhaps drowned in one of the kloofs, yours will be the blame, and I will see you are brought to book for it." She spoke with the utmost malice and satisfaction. "Now, get out of my room!"

Christine went. Indeed, she was convinced that for once the woman spoke truth and that Roddy was not there or anywhere in the house. It was out-of-doors that she must seek him. So back to her room on winged feet to get a waterproof and make her way from the house. For once, the front door was barred! Outside, the rain had ceased as suddenly as it had burst from the heavens. Only the wind swished and howled wildly among the trees, tearing up handfuls of gravel to fling against the doors and windows. Afar off was a roaring sound new to her, that, later, she discovered to be the rushing waters in the kloofs that were tearing tumultuously to swell the river a few miles off. Clouds had blotted out moon and stars. All the light there was came intermittently from whip-like lightning flashes across the sky. It helped Christine a little as she stumbled through the darkness, crying out Roddy's name, but she found herself often colliding with trees, and prickly-pear bushes seemed to be rushing hither and thither, waving fantastic arms and clutching for her as she passed. The idea had come to her suddenly to seek Andrew McNeil and ask for his help. He was the only friendly soul of all those on the farm that she could turn to. True, another face presented itself to her mind for one moment, but she banished it with scorn, despising herself for even thinking of Dick Saltire.

She fancied that McNeil lodged at the storekeeper's place, and set herself to find the route she had taken that afternoon—no easy task in the darkness that surrounded her. But at last she saw a twinkle of light, and, approaching closer, found that, by great good luck, she had indeed happened on the store. The door stood open, and she could see the man behind the counter talking to McNeil, who, seated on an upturned case, was smoking peacefully. Someone else was there too—someone whose straight back and gallant air was very familiar to her. Saltire was buying tobacco from the storekeeper. But Christine had no word for him. She went straight to McNeil with her story.

"Roddy is lost!" she cried. "You must please come and help me find him."

The men stared, electrified at her appearance. White as a bone, her beautiful violet eyes full of haunting fear; her hair, torn down by the wind and flickering in long black strands about her face, far below her waist, she looked like a wraith of the storm.

"Roddy lost!" McNeil and the storekeeper turned mechanically as one man to Saltire. It was only the girl who would not turn to him.

"Come quickly!" she urged. "He may be drowning somewhere, even now, in one of the swollen streams." She imagined the tragedy to herself as she spoke, and her voice was full of wistful despair.

"Get her a hot drink." Saltire, flinging the command to the storekeeper, spoke for the first time. "I'll round up the boys and get lanterns for a search." In a few moments there was a flicker of lanterns without, and the murmur of voices.

"Come along, Niekerk!" commanded Saltire, and the storekeeper began to put his lights out. "McNeil, you take Miss Chaine back to the farm."

"No, no; I must come, too!" she cried.

"Impossible," he said curtly. "You will only be a hindrance."

"Then I will go home alone," she said quietly, "and free Mr. McNeil to accompany you."

"Very well—if you think you can find your way. Here is a lantern."

She took it and went her way while they went theirs. Long before she reached the garden round the house, the lantern in her unskilful hands had gone out and she was groping by instinct.

All the weariness and strain of the day had suddenly descended upon her in a cloud. She knew she was near the end of her tether. This life at Blue Aloes was too much for her, after all; she must give it best at last; it was dominating her, driving her like a leaf before the wind. These were her thoughts as she crept wearily through the garden, but suddenly she heard voices and was galvanized into hope, tinged with fear. Perhaps Roddy was found! Perhaps her terror and suffering had been unnecessary. She listened for a moment, then located the speakers close to her in the stoep.

"Dick," a voice she knew was saying, "I am sick of it. Bernard may die down in East London, but we shall never get rid of the boy while that English Jezebel is here. And she knows too much now. We had better go. Blue Aloes will never be ours to sell and go back to our own dear island. Everything has gone wrong."

"Nonsense, Issa. You are too impatient. Van Cannan will never come back. He is too full of antimony. As for Roddy, poor kid, he is probably drowned in one of the kloofs and speeding for the river by now—just the sort of adventure his queer little mind would embark on. No one can blame us for that, at least. You are far too easily discouraged, my darling. Wait till the morning." The voice was the soft, sonorous voice of Saxby, and a lightning flash revealed to the girl cowering among the trees that it was he who held Isabel van Cannan in his arms.

There were two "Dicks" at Blue Aloes, and Christine, not knowing it, had been guilty of a grave injustice to Richard Saltire! Aghast as she was by the revelation, all her love and faith came tingling back in a sweet, overwhelming flood. For a moment or two she forgot Roddy, forgot where she was, forgot all the world but Saltire, and her attention was withdrawn from the pair in the stoep—indeed, she had no desire to hear their words, now that she was sure they knew no more of the boy's whereabouts than she herself. But the muffled clang of the bar across the front door broke through her thoughts, and she became aware that Saxby had left and Mrs. van Cannan gone in. She was alone in the gaunt darkness, barred out, and with no means of getting into the house; all other doors were locked, as well she knew, and all shutters firmly bolted, including those of the nursery. However, the fact did not worry her greatly, for the thought of being snug and safe while poor Roddy roamed somewhere in the blackness had no appeal for her. Out here, she seemed, somehow, nearer to him, and to the man whom she now knew she had deeply wronged. Lanterns, twinkling like will-o'-the-wisps in every direction, told of the search going forward, and she determined to stay in the summer-house and wait for what news might come. It was very obscure there, and she knew not what loathly insects might be crawling on the seats and table, but, at any rate, it was shelter from the rain, which now again began to fall heavily.

It seemed to her hours that she sat there while the storm swept round her and the rushing of many waters filled her ears. As a matter of fact, it was less than half an hour before she determined that inactivity was something not to be borne another moment and that she must return and join in the search for Roddy. So out she stumbled across the veld again, in the direction of the lanterns, evading as best she could the prickly-pear bushes, stubbing her feet against rocks and boschies, drenched and driven by the storm. It was old Andrew McNeil whom she found first, and he seemed an angel from heaven after the vile and menacing loneliness, although he was but ill pleased to see her.

"You should be in your bed, lassie," he muttered. "The poor bairn will never be found this night. We've searched everywhere. There's nothing left but the water."

"Oh, don't say that!" she cried woefully, and peered, fascinated, at the boiling torrent rushing down a kloof that but yesterday was an innocent gully they had crossed in their walks, in some places so narrow as to allow a jump from bank to bank. Now it was a turbulent flood of yellow water, spreading far beyond its banks and roaring with a rage unappeasable. While they stood there, staring, Saltire came up.

"You, Miss Chaine! I thought I asked you to return to the farm." His tones, were frigid, but his eyes compassionate. No one with any humanity could have failed to be touched by the forlorn girl, pale and lovely in the dim light.

"I had to come. I could not stay inert any longer."

"We have searched every inch of the land inside the aloes," he said. "He has either fallen into one of the streams or got out beyond the hedge into the open veld—which seems impossible, somehow. At any rate, we can do no more until it is light." He dismissed the natives with a brief: "Get home, boys. Hamba lalla!" then turned to McNeil. "Take Miss Chaine's other arm, Mac; we must see for ourselves that she goes indoors."

She made some sound of remonstrance, but he paid no attention, simply taking her arm, half leading, half supporting her. There was a long way to go. They walked awhile in a silence that had hopelessness in it; then Christine asked:

"Did you search every outhouse and barn?"

"Every one, and the cemetery, too," answered Saltire. "There's not a place inside or out of the farm-buildings we haven't been over—except Saxby's bungalow, and he's hardly likely to be there."

"He was there this afternoon," said Christine slowly. It seemed to her time to let them into the truth.

"What!"

Both men halted in amazement. Such a thing as any one but Mrs. van Cannan going to Saxby's was unknown. Briefly she recounted the incidents of the afternoon. The men's verdict was the same as hers had been.

"Atrocious!"

"Infamous! After that, we will certainly visit Saxby's," decided
Saltire. "But, first, Miss Chaine must go home."

"No, no; let me come," she begged. "It is not far. I must know."

So, in the end, she got her way, and they all approached the bungalow together. It was in utter darkness, and the men had to rap loud and long before any response came from within. At last Saxby's voice was heard inquiring who the deuce, and what the deuce, etc., etc., at that time of the night—followed by his appearance in the doorway with a candle.

"We want to come in and look for Roddy," said Saltire briefly, and, without further ado, pushed the burly man aside and entered, followed by McNeil. Christine, too, entered, and sat down inside the door. She was very exhausted. Saxby appeared too flabbergasted to move for a moment. Then he remonstrated with considerable heat.

"What do you mean by this? You don't seem to know that you are in my house!"

But the other two had already passed through the empty sitting-room to the one beyond, and were casting lantern-gleams from side to side, examining everything.

"You must be crazy to think the boy is here," Saxby blustered, as they re-emerged. They paid not the slightest attention to him, but continued their search into the kitchen, the only other room of the house.

"No," said Saltire, very quietly, as he came back into the room and set the light on the table; "the boy is not here. But where is Mrs. Saxby?"

Saxby's face had grown rather pallid, but his jaw was set in a dogged fashion.

"That is my business," he said harshly.

It was Saltire whose face and manner had become subtly agreeable.

"Oh, no, Saxby; it is all of our business at present. What I find so strange is that nowhere in the house is there any sign or token that a woman lives here, or has ever lived here. It seems to me that needs a little explaining."

"You'll get no explanation from me," was the curt answer.

"I think you had better tell us something about it," said Saltire pleasantly. He held the lantern high, and it lighted up a shelf upon which stood some curious glass jars with perforated stoppers. "I see you have a fine collection of live tarantulas and scorpions. I remember now I have often seen you groping among the aloes. Curious hobby!"

"Get out of my house!" said Saxby, with sudden rage.

"And is the snake still in the box?" asked Saltire, approaching the table where the cardboard box still occupied its central position, with the heavy iron on top of it.

"Don't touch it, for God's sake!" shouted Saxby, lunging forward to stop him, but the deed was already done, though Saltire himself was unprepared for what followed on his lifting the iron. The lid flew up, and, with a soft hiss, something slim and swift as a black arrow darted across the air, seemed to kiss Saxby in passing, and was gone through the open door into the night.

The big man made a strange sound and put his hand to his throat. He swayed a little, and then sank upon a long cane lounge. Christine noticed that his eyes rolled with the same curious evolution as the eyes of Mrs. van Cannan had performed that afternoon. It was as though they turned in his head for a moment, showing nothing but the white eyeball. She wondered why the other men rushed to the sideboard and opened a brandy-bottle, and while she stayed, wondering, Saxby spoke softly, looking at her with his beautiful, melancholy brown eyes.

"I shall be dead in half an hour. Fetch Isabel. Let me see her face before I die."

She knew him for a bad man, false friend, one who could be cruel to a little child; yet it seemed he could love well. That was something. She found herself running through the darkness as she had never run in her life, to do the last behest of Richard Saxby.

When she and Isabel van Cannan returned, they found him almost gone. Saltire and McNeil had worked over him until the sweat dripped from their faces, but he who has been kissed by the black mamba, deadliest of snakes, is lost beyond all human effort. The light was fast fading from his face, but, for a moment, a spurt of life leaped in his eyes. He held out his aims to the woman, and she fell weeping into them. Christine turned away and stared out at the darkness. Saltire had been writing; a sheet of paper upon which the ink was still wet lay upon the table, and in his hand he held a packet of letters.

"I have told everything, Issa," muttered the dying man. "I had to clean my soul of it."

She recoiled fiercely from him.

"'Told everything?'" she repeated, and her face blanched with fury and despair. It seemed as if she would have struck him across the lips, but McNeil intervened.

"Have reverence for a passing soul, woman," said he sternly. "Black as his crimes are, yours are blacker, I'm thinking. He was only the tool of the woman he loved—his lawful wife."

"You said that?" she raved. But Saxby was beyond recriminations. That dark soul had passed to its own place. She turned again to the others, foaming like a creature trapped.

"It is all lies, lies!"—then fell silent, her eyes sealed to the newly written paper on the table under Saltire's hand. At last, she said quietly: "I must, however, insist upon knowing what he has said about me. What is written on that paper, Mr. Saltire?"

"If you insist, I will read it," he answered. "Though it is scarcely in my province to do so."

"It is only fair that I should hear," she said, with great calmness.
And Saltire read out the terse phrases that bore upon them the stamp of
Death's hurrying hand.

"I am a native of the island Z—— in the West Indies. Isabel Saxby, known as van Cannan, is my wife. While travelling to the Cape Colony on some business of mine, she met van Cannan and his wife and stayed with them at East London. When she did not return to Z——, I came to look for her and found that, Mrs. van Cannan having died, she had bigamously married the widower and come to live at Blue Aloes. I loved her, and could not bear to be parted from her, so, through her instrumentality, I came here as manager. The eldest boy was drowned before my arrival. The youngest died six months later of a bite from one of my specimen tarantulas. The third boy is, I expect, drowned tonight. I take the blame of all these deaths and of Bernard van Cannan's, if he does not return. It was only when all male van Cannans were dead that Blue Aloes could be sold for a large sum enabling us to return to Z——. We would have taken the little girls with us.

"With my dying breath, I take full blame for all on my shoulders. No one is guilty but I.

"[Signed.] RICHARD SAXBY."

"Poor fellow!" said the listening woman gently. "Poor fellow to have died with such terrible delusions torturing him!" She passed her hands over her eyes, wiping away her tears and with them every last trace of violence and anger. Subtly her face had changed back to the babylike, laughing, sleepy face they all knew so well—the face that had held the dead man in thrall and made Bernard van Cannan forget the mother of his children.

"You will please give me that paper, Mr. Saltire," she pleaded, "and you will please all of you forget the ravings of poor Dick Saxby. It is true that I knew him in the past, and that he followed me here, but the rest, as you must realize, are simply hallucinations of a poisoned brain."

Andrew McNeil's dour face had grown bewildered, but softened. Christine—if she had not seen a little too much, if she had not known that lovely golden hair hanging in rich plaits about the woman's shoulders covered the crisped head of a white negress, if she had not overheard impassioned words at midnight, if she had not loved Roddy so well—might have been beguiled. But there was one person upon whom the artist's wiles were wasted.

"I'm afraid it can't be done, Mrs. Saxby," said Saltire gravely. "The testimony of a dying man is sacred—and Saxby's mind was perfectly clear."

"How could it have been? And do not call me 'Mrs. Saxby,' please." She still spoke patiently, but a smouldering fire began to kindle in her eyes.

"You see," he continued, exhibiting the packet of letters to which he now added the testimony, "I have here the certificate of your marriage to Saxby six years ago in the West Indies—and also proof of the possession by you of a large amount of antimony. You may, of course, be able to explain away these things, as well as Saxby's testimony, but you will understand that I cannot oblige you by handing them over." A silence fell, in which only her rapid breathing could be heard. "There is one thing, however, you can do, that will perhaps help a little. Tell us where Roddy is—if you know."

The smouldering fires leaped to flame. She glared at him like a tigress.

"Oh, you, and your Roddys!" she cried savagely. "If I knew where he was, I would kill him! I would kill any one I could who stood in my way—do you understand? That is how we are made in my land. Oh, that I ever left it, to come to this vile and barren desert!"

She gave one swift, terrible look at the dead man and swept from the house. That was the last time any one of them ever saw her.

When, a little later, Saltire, McNeil, and Christine came out of the dead man's house and left him to his long silence, the black wings of night were lifted, the storm was past, and a rose-red dawn veiled in silver bedecked the sky. The hills were tender with pearl and azure. The earth smelled sweet and freshly washed. A flock of wild duck rose from the dam and went streaking across the horizon like in a Japanese etching. All the land was full of dew and dreams. It was almost impossible to despair in such an hour. Christine felt the wings of hope beating in her breast, and an unaccountable trust in the goodness of God filled her.

"Joy cometh in the morning," she said, half to herself, half to the men who walked, sombre and silent, beside her, and the shadow of a smile hovered on her lips. They looked at her wonderingly. The night of terror had taken toll of her, and she was pale as the last star before dawn. Yet her white beauty framed in hanging hair shone like some rare thing that had passed through fire and come out unscathed and purified in the passing. "Il faut souffrir pour Être belle" is a frivolous French saying, but, like many frivolous phrases, has its basic roots in the truth. It was true enough of Christine Chaine in that hour. She had suffered and was beautiful. Dour old Andrew McNeil gave a sigh for the years of life that lay behind him, and a glance at the face of the other man; then, like a wise being, he said,

"Well, I'll be going on down."

So Christine and Dick Saltire walked alone.

"Let us hurry," she said suddenly, quickening her pace. "I feel as though something may have happened."

But all was silent at the farm. It was still too early even for the servants to be astir, and the big front door stood open as she and the other woman had left it an hour or so agone.

She left Saltire in the stoep and went within. The little girls slept peacefully, ignorant of the absence of their brother.

All seemed unchanged, yet Christine's searching eye found one thing that was unusual—a twist of paper stuck through the slats of the shutter. In a moment, she had it untwisted and was reading the words printed in ungainly letters upon it.

"Do not worry. Roddy quite safe. Will come back when his father returns."

"I knew," she whispered to herself, "I knew that joy cometh." She looked in the mirror and was ashamed of the disarray she saw there, yet thought that, even so, a man who loved her might perhaps find her fair. As a last thought, she took Roddy's two yellow roses and stuck them in the bosom of her gown. Then she went back to the stoep and, showing Saltire the paper, told him the story of the whispering thing that had sighed so often for Roddy's safety outside her window.

"I feel sure, somehow, that, after all, he is safe, and with that friend who knew more than we did, who knew all the tragedy of the mother and the other two little sons, and feared for Roddy from the first."

Saltire made no answer, for he was looking at the roses and then into her eyes; and when she tried to return the look, the weight of the little stones was on her lids again, and her lips a-quiver. But he held her against his heart close, close—crushing the yellow roses, kissing the little stones from her lids and the quiver from her lips. Then he left her swiftly; for it is a sweet and terrible thing to kiss the lips and crush the roses and go, and a better thing to hasten the hour when one may kiss the lips and crush the roses—and stay.

So she did not see him again for three days. But from the faithful McNeil she heard that the flooded river had been forded and a telegram sent recalling Bernard van Cannan, that a search had been instituted for the mistress of Blue Aloes, who was missing, that a party of farmers had been collected to "sit" upon the body of Richard Saxby, and had pronounced him most regrettably dead from the bite of a black mamba. Whereafter he was buried in a quiet spot near the hedge of blue aloes, from which he had collected so many rare specimens of poisonous reptiles and insects.

On the third day, one of the kloofs on the farm gave up a wig of golden hair, all muddy and weed-entangled. The natives hung it on a bush to dry, and there was much gossip among them that day, hastily hushed when any European person came by.

At nine o'clock the same evening, Roddy was found peacefully sleeping in the bed with Meekie carefully adjusting the mosquito-curtains over him as though he had never been missing. In the morning, he told Christine he had had an awfully funny dream.

"I dreamed I was with my old 'nannie' again—you know—Sophy. She was all covered up, and I could only see her eyes looking through holes in a white thing. She was living all by herself in a hut. I didn't stay with her, but with another old woman, but she used to come and see me every day, and sometimes Meekie used to come, too, and Klaas and Jacoop and all the farm-boys to talk to me. The old woman kept giving me some tea made of herbs that made me feel very quiet and happy, and Sophy told me I should come back soon to the farm when daddy was home again. She was always covered up with white clothes, and I could only see her eyes, and I love Sophy very much, Miss Chaine, but I can't say she smelled very nice in my dream. It was a very funny dream, though, and lasted an awful long time."

It had indeed lasted three days, but Roddy would never know that, during those three days, he had been incarcerated in the Kafir kraal on the hillside, outside the aloe hedge. It was only when the golden wig was washed up from the river that the mysterious kraal people, silent and impassive, seemingly ignorant of all but their duties, yet knowing every single thing that passed at the farm, even down to the use of the false hair (though Bernard van Cannan himself had never suspected this), gave him back to those who awaited.

If Dick Saltire had not so thoroughly understood the native mind and inspired the confidence of his boys, the truth might never have been known. As it was, it lay in his power to relate to those whom it concerned that a certain woman named Sophy Bronjon, formerly nurse to the van Cannans, and sent away by them to be conveyed to Robin Island because she had developed leprosy, had never left the precincts of the farm, but stayed there, brooding over the little ones she loved. The kraal people to whom (though a mission-educated woman) she belonged had hidden and sheltered her. Through Meekie's instrumentality, she undoubtedly knew all that passed on the farm, and as surely as she had noted the fate of the van Cannan heirs, she recognized Christine as an ally and friend, and had warned her as best she could of the dangers that beset Roddy. It was she who had sighed and whispered through the closed shutters, frightening Christine at first, but in the end engendering trust, and it was she who, on hearing of the narrow escape of Roddy from the tarantula, had made up her mind to spirit him, with the aid of Meekie and the storm, from the farm and its dangers until the return of his father.

With the disappearance of Mrs. van Cannan and the death of Saxby, the menace was removed and the child brought back as silently as he had been taken away. Even he knew no more than that he had dreamed a strange dream.

Saltire went to meet Bernard van Cannan at Cradock, taking with him the papers left in his care by Richard Saxby. There was not so much to explain to the owner of Blue Aloes, as might have been expected. The doctor who treated him for neuritis and found him dying of slow poisoning by antimony had lifted the scales from his eyes, and a little clear thought, away from the spell of the woman known as Isabel van Cannan, had done much to show him that the sequence of tragedies in his home was due to something more than the callousness of fate. Thus he was, in some measure, prepared for Saxby's confession, though not for the fact that the woman he had adored to fanaticism had never been his wife, or more to him than might have been an adder gathered from his own aloe hedge, with all the traits and attributes peculiar to adders who are gathered to the bosom and warmed there.

He came back to a home from which the spell of the golden, laughing woman was lifted. The evil menace that had hung for so long over the old farm was lifted for ever. Part was buried by the blue-aloe hedge; part of it, plucked from the dregs of an ebbing river, lay in a far grave with no mark on it but the plain words, "Isabel Saxby." While the sad watcher in the kraal had no more need to walk and whisper warnings by night.

It was the children who laughed now at Blue Aloes, merry and free as elves in a wood. There was a glow came out of Christine Chaine that communicated itself to all. She and Saltire were to be married as soon as a Quentin aunt, who was on her way, had settled down comfortably with the children. Afterward, Roddy would live with them at the Cape until his schooldays were over. In the meantime, they walked in a garden of Eden, for the rains had made the desert bloom, and life offered them its fairest blossoms with both hands.

The Leopard

PART I

It was nine o'clock, and time for the first waltz to strike up. The wide, empty floor of the Falcon Hotel lounge gleamed with a waxen glaze under the brilliant lights, and the dancers' feet were tingling to begin. Michael Walsh, who always played at the Wankelo dances, sat down at the piano and struck two loud arresting bars, then gently caressed from the keys the crooning melody of the Wisteria Waltz. Two by two, the dancers drew into the maze of music and movement, and became part of a weaving rhythmic, kaleidoscopic picture.

There was not an ill-looking person in the room. The men were of a tanned, hard-bitten, adventurous brand; the women were nearly all pretty or attractive or both, and mostly young. These are the usual attributes of women in a new country like Rhodesia; for men do not take ugly, unattractive women to share life with them in the wilds, and girls born in such places have a gift all their own of beauty and charm.

Many of them were badly dressed, however, for that, too, is an attribute of the wilds, where women mostly make their own clothes, unless they are rich enough to get frequent parcels from England. There was this to be noted about the gowns: When they were new, they were patchy affairs, made up at home from materials bought in Rhodesian shops; but when well cut, they were battered and worn. Take, for instance, Mrs. Lisle's gown of pale-green satin and sequins. She had been an actress before she married Barton Lisle and came out to the ups and downs of a mining speculator's life, and all her clothes were rÉchauffÉes of the toilettes in which she had once dazzled provincial audiences. Gay Liscannon's frock of pale rose-leaf silk, with a skirt that was a flurry of delicious little frills and a bodice of lace, sewn with little paste dew drops that folded around her fresh young form like the filmy wings of a butterfly, had Bond Street stamped all over it, as they who ran might read; but it had not been paid for, although it was already tumbling into little tears and tatters. For Gay was no Penelope to sit patiently at home and ply the nimble needle. She had worn it to six dances already, and would probably wear it another six before she summoned up the nerve to present her father with the bill.

Berlie Hallett possessed a London godmother in the shape of an aunt who sent her an occasional frock, and her white-tulle-and-forget-me-nots was all that it should have been except that it had turned to an ashen creamy hue, possessed a long tear down the back (unskilfully concealed by a ribbon sash), lacked about six yards of lace (accidentally ripped off the flounces), and was minus a few dozen posies of forget-me-nots (now in the possession of various amorous young men). Berlie no more than her friend Gay was a sit-by-the-fire-and-mend creature. They were real, live, out-of-door, golfing, hard-riding girls, full of spirits and gaiety and joie de vivre.

Berlie, at that moment, was dancing with all her soul as well as her feet, melted in the arms of Johnny Doran, a rich rancher who had proposed to her eight times and whom she intended should propose another ten before she finally refused him. But Gay, the best dancer in Rhodesia, was not dancing. Her feet were tingling, and the music was in her brain like wine, and her heart was burning, and her eyes, though not turned that way, were watching, with impatient wrath, the door across the room. But with her lips she smiled at the little group of clamouring, protesting men about her, and gave out one brief statement.

"My shoe hurts me."

"Which one?" they clamoured, like a lot of school-boys. "And why? It's the same pair you danced to the dawn in last week—why should it hurt you now? And why does one hurt you? Why not two? Who will bet that it won't stop hurting after this dance?" they inquired of one another, "and who is the man it is hurting for?"

Gay surveyed them dispassionately with her misty, violet eyes.

"Don't be silly," said she serenely; "my shoe hurts."

They gave her up as hopeless and faded away, one by one, bent on finding someone to finish the waltz with. Men out-numbered girls by about four to one in Wankelo. Only Tryon stayed, lounging against the wall, smiling subtly to himself.

"There's Molly Tring just coming in," said Gay to him. "You'd better go and get a dance from her, Dick."

"By and by," said Tryon, with his cryptic smile. "I'm waiting for something."

Even as he spoke, Gay saw across the room the face she had been watching for. A tall man had come into the doorway and stood casting a casual but comprehensive eye about him. He was not in evening dress, but wore a loose grey lounge suit of rather careless aspect, and his short, fairish, curly hair was ruffled as though he had been running his fingers through it. Accompanying him was a small black dog with a large stone in its mouth, which came into the ballroom and sat down. Gay gave one look at the pair of them, and the colour went out of her face. There was more than a glint of passion in the eyes she turned to Tyron, who was smiling no longer.

"I'll finish this dance with you, if you like, Dick."

"My shoe hurts," said Tryon.

She flung away from him in a rage and a moment later, was lost among the rest of the dancers in the arms of one Claude Hayes, a man not too proud to take the goods the gods offered, even if they were short ratio. Tryon sauntered over to the doorway tenanted by the man in grey, who appeared to be delightfully impervious to the fact that he was the only person on the scene not in evening dress.

"Hello, Tryon!" said he.

"Hello, Lundi! Thought you meant to turn up and dance tonight?"

"Yes, so I did," said Lundi Druro, looking at Tryon with the blithe and friendly smile that made all men like him. "But I forgot."

"I won't ask what you were doing, then," was Tryon's dry comment. To which Druro responded nothing. He was one of those who did before the sun and moon that which seemed good unto him to do, with a sublime indifference to comments. Everyone knew what he was doing when he "forgot," and he didn't care if they did.

"Lundi meant to get married, but he forgot," was a household jest in Rhodesia, founded on a legend from home that, at a certain supper-party, a beautiful actress had inveigled him into making her an offer of marriage, and the ceremony had been fixed for the following day. But, though bride and wedding-party turned up at the appointed hour, the bridegroom never materialized. He had gone straight from the supper-party at the Savoy to the Green Room Club and fallen into a game of poker that lasted throughout the night and all the next day, with the result that all memory of the proposed wedding had faded from his mind. The lady, very much injured in her tenderest feeling (professional and personal vanity), had sued him for a large sum of money, which he had paid without blinking and returned to South Africa, heart-free, to make some more.

"Did you pull in the pot?" asked Tryon, who was a poker player himself.

"No," said Druro regretfully; "hadn't time. I left the game and came away as soon as I remembered this blessed dance."

Just then the waltz came to an end, its last notes trailing off into nothingness and blowing away like a handful of leaves on a breeze. The kaleidoscopic patterns sorted themselves and turned into a circle of perambulating couples, and Gay and her partner passed the two men in the doorway.

"Hi! I want to speak to you," said Druro, whose manners were unique, making an imperious sign at Gay. She looked at him with eyes like frozen violets and walked on. Druro, looking after her, observed that she and her partner passed out of a door leading to the east veranda.

"H'm!" said he, reflective but unperturbed. Then he turned to Tryon.
"Go and get Hayes away from her, Tryon."

"That's a nice job!" commented Tryon.

"Go on, old man!" said Druro, kindly but firmly. "Tell him there's a man in the bar wants to see him on a matter of life and death. He'll thank you for it afterward."

Tryon went grumbling through the ballroom, and Druro stepped back out of the front hall into the street and made a circuit of the hotel. By the time he had reached the east veranda, Tryon was gently leading away the unresisting Hayes, and a rose-leaf shoe, visible between two pots of giant croton, guided the stalker to his prey. He sat down on a seat beside her.

"Did you mean it when you cut me in that brutal manner just now—or was it an accident?" he asked reproachfully.

Gay did not answer or stir. His manner changed.

"Gay, I am most awfully sorry and ashamed of myself. Will you forgive me?"

The girl sat up straight in her chair at that, and looked at him. She was too generous to ignore a frank appeal for pardon, but she had that within which demanded propitiation.

"Have you any explanation to offer?" she asked, and he answered:

"I clean forgot all about it."

She stared at him in exasperation and scorn, her eyes sparkling with anger, and he returned her gaze with his frank and fearless smile. "M'Schlega," the natives called him—"the man who always laughs whether good or bad comes to him."

Gay at last withdrew her face into the shadows where he could no longer see it clearly.

"I suppose you think that disappointing a girl and making her lose a dance is nothing," she said quietly.

"You misjudge me. If I had thought about it at all, it would never have happened. But the whole thing went clean out of my mind until it was too late to dress and get down here in time. Do you think I would purposely miss such a keen pleasure as it is to dance with you—and the honour of having your first waltz given me?"

She did not answer, but slowly her anger began to fade.

"I came down here as hard as I could belt, as soon as I remembered."

More anger melted away.

"I haven't even had my dinner yet."

Gay sprang up like a whirlwind.

"Oh, how detestable you are," she said, in a low, furious voice, "with your dinner and your wretched excuses! Do you think I don't know what you were doing that you forgot? Everyone knows what you are doing when you forget your engagements—playing poker and drinking with a lot of low gambling men, wasting your money and your time and all that is fine in you!"

Druro had stood up, too, and faced her with the first bolt she flung. They were quite alone, for the trilling notes of a two-step had swiftly emptied the veranda. He still wore a smile on his lips, but its singularly heart-warming quality had gone from it. His red-brown face had grown a shade less red-brown, and his grey, whimsical, good-natured eyes looked suddenly hard as rock. He addressed her as if she were someone he had never met before.

"You are very plain-spoken!"

"You need a little plain-speaking," she said passionately.

"It is a pity to waste wit and wisdom on an object so unworthy. Obviously, I am past reforming"—his smile had a mocking turn to it now—"even if I wanted to be reformed."

"Of course you don't want to be reformed," said Gay. "No drunkard and gambler ever does."

Her voice was hard, but there was a pain in her heart like the twist of a knife there. She pressed her hand among the laces of her dress, and all the little paste jewels twinkled. Druro noticed them. They engaged his attention, even while he was swallowing down her words like a bitter dose of poison. He was deeply offended. She spoke to him as if he were some kind of a pariah, and it was unpardonable. If she had been a man, he would have known what to do, and have done it quick. But what could be done with a slip of a girl who stood there with a folded lace butterfly around her and looked like a passionate tea-rose twinkling with dewdrops? Nothing, except just smile. But only the self-control gained in many a hard-won and ably bluffed game of life (and poker) enabled him to do it, and to say, with great gentleness:

"I'm afraid that I am as I am. You must take me or leave me at that."

"I'll leave you, then," she said burningly, and slipped past him. At the door of the ballroom she looked back and flung him a last word, "Until you are a different man from the present Lundi Druro."

Druro, entirely taken aback by her decisive retort and action, stood staring long after she had disappeared.

"Well, by the living something or other!" he muttered at last, and walked away from the hotel, filled with wholesale rage and indignation. "The little shrew! Who asked her to take me, I wonder? Or for her opinions on my ways of living? Of all the cheeky monkeys! Pitching into me like that—just because she missed her blessed waltz! Certainly it was rotten of me—I don't say it wasn't. But I forgot. I told her I forgot. Didn't I come straight down here and tell her? Left those fellows—left a jack-pot! O my aunt! And that's all I get for it—a decent and reasonable fellow like me to be called such names just because I distract myself with the only one or two things that can delude one into believing that life is worth living in this rotten country! Drunkard and gambler—fine words to fling at a man like bomb-shells!"

Thus it was with Druro, whom all men hailed as "well-met," and all women liked, and all Rhodesia called "Lundi," though his Christian names were really Francis Everard. No one had ever called him anything but Lundi since the day he jumped into the Lundi River to save his dog's life. He was on a shoot with half a dozen other men, and they had heavily dynamited a portion of the river to bring up some fresh fish for dinner. Druro's dog, thinking it was a game he knew, jumped in after one of the sticks of dynamite to bring it out to his master, and Druro, like a flash, was in after him and out again, just in time to save himself and the dog from being blown to smithereens. "The bravest action he had ever seen in his life," one of the witnesses described it—and he had been through several native wars and knew what he was talking about, just as Druro, who was a mining expert, knew the risk he was taking when he jumped in among the dynamite.

This was the man who was filled with rage and desolation of heart at the words of "a little monkey of eighteen or nineteen—old dissipated Derek Liscannon's daughter, I thank you! Nice school to come to for temperance lectures! Not that she can help being Derry's daughter, and not that old Derry is a bad sort—far from it—but as hard a drinker as you could find in a day's march. And young Derry hits it up a bit, too, though one of the nicest boys in the world. I've always said that Gay was the sweetest, prettiest little kid in Rhodesia—in Africa, if it comes to that—and now she turns on me like this—blow her buttons!"

He strode along the soft, dusty roads that still had a feel of the veld in them, neither looking nor listing whither he went. It was a soft, plaintive voice that brought him to a standstill, and the realization that he was close to the Wankelo railway station.

"Oh, can you tell whether the Falcon Hotel is far from here?"

"The Falcon Hotel, madam?" His hand went instinctively to his head, but there was no hat upon it. "There is surely a bus here that will take you to it," he said, looking about him.

She gave a little laugh.

"Yes; but I don't want my poor bones rattled to pieces in a bus if it is not too far to walk."

Dimly he could see a slight figure swathed in velvety darkness of furs and veils that gave out a faint perfume of violets, and the suggestion of a pale, oval face. Her voice was low and sweet.

"It is not very far," said Druro. "I will gladly show you the way, if you will allow me."

"That is so very kind of you," she answered softly, and fell into step by his side.

As they walked, she told him, with the simple aplomb of a well-bred woman of the world, that she had just arrived by the train from Buluwayo and was going on to a place called Selukine for a week or two. It was not necessary for her to tell him that she was recently from home, for he knew it by her air, her voice, her accent, her rustly garments, the soft perfume of fur and violets, and a dozen little intangible signs and symbols that all had an appeal for him. For Druro was one of those Englishmen who love England from afar a great deal better than they do when at home. He had lived in Rhodesia, off and on, for ten years, and the veld life was in the very blood and bones of him. Yet he always spoke of it as a rotten country, and gravely affirmed that it was bad luck to have to live away from England.

"Give me London lamp-posts," he was in the habit of saying, "and you can have all the veld you want for keeps." And he went home every year, declaring that he was finished with Africa and would never come back. Yet he came back. Also, he had built himself a lovely little ranch-house in the midst of five thousand acres of Sombwelo Forest, where there were no lampposts at all, only trees and a silent, deep river full of crocodiles. It is true that he had never lived there. He only went there and mooned by himself sometimes, when he was "out" with the world. It had occurred to him, since his rencontre with Gay, that he would go there very shortly. But now this rustling, softly perfumed lady made him remember his beloved lampposts. It was a year since he had been home, and she meant home.

She was London; she was Torment; she was Town.

Curiosity to see her face consumed him. He felt certain that she was beautiful. No plain woman could be so self-possessed and sure of herself, could give out such subtle charm and fascination. After the brutal and unexpected treatment he had received at the hands of Gay Liscannon, he felt himself under some sweet, healing spell.

They reached the hotel all too soon. The bus, with her luggage on it, had passed them by the way, and host and porters were awaiting her at the front door. In the light she turned to thank him with a charming smile, and he saw, as he expected, that her face was subtly beautiful.

"I hope we shall meet again, Mr.——" She paused smiling.

"Druro," he supplied, smiling too, "and this is Rhodesia. I'm afraid you can't miss meeting me again—if you try."

He, too, as she very well observed, was good to behold, standing there with the light on his handsome head. She did not miss the potency of his smile. Nor, being a woman who dealt in lights and shades herself, was the flattering significance of his words wasted upon her.

"Tant meiux!" she said, and, in case he was no French scholar, repeated it in English, as she held out her slim gloved hand—"All the better!"

Gay and a man she had been dancing with came out and passed them as they stood there smiling and touching hands—a handsome, debonair man and a subtly beautiful woman. Gay took the picture of them home with her, and stayed long thinking of it when she should have been sleeping. Long she leaned from her bedroom window, gazing at the great grey spaces of veld that she loved so much, but seeing them not. All she could see was Druro's face turned cold, the rocklike expression of his eyes when he stared at her as though she had been some stranger—she, who had loved him for years, ever since, as a girl of sixteen, straight from England and from school, she first saw him and found in his clear, careless face and fearless ways the crystallization of all her girlish dreams. Lovely and spirited, decked in the bloom of youth, she had more, perhaps, than her fair share of admirers and adorers. Every man who met her fell, to some extent, in love with her. "Gay fever" it was called; and they all went through it, and some recovered and some did not. But Gay's fever was for Lundi Druro, though she hid it well behind locked lips and a sweet, serene gaze. She could not see him riding down the street, or standing among a group of his fellows (for other men always clustered about Druro), or even catch a glimpse of his big red Argyle car standing outside a building, without a tingling of all the life in her veins.

But she was neither blind nor a fool. Her spirit brooded over Druro with the half-mystical and half-maternal love that all true women accord to the beloved; but she knew very well that he had never looked her way and that the chances were he never might. He was a man's man. He liked women, and his eyes always lit up when he saw one, but he forgot all about them when they were not there, forgot them easily in cards and conviviality and the society of other men. Once, when someone had attacked him about his indifference to women, he had answered:

"Why, I adore women! But I prefer the society of men—there are fewer regrets afterward."

There was no doubt that he exercised a tremendous personal magnetism upon other men—attracted them, amused them, and influenced them, even obsessed them. The way he could make them do things just out of sheer liking for him almost amounted to mesmerism. It must be added that, though they were often unpractical, crazy, unwise, even dangerous things he influenced others to do, they were never shameful or in any way shady. There wasn't a shameful instinct or thought in the whole of Lundi Druro's composition. Gay, however, divined in him that his power of obsessing the minds of other men had become, or was on the way of becoming, a temptation and obsession to himself. She was wise enough to realize that hardly any man in the world can stand too much popularity, also to see the rocks ahead for Druro in a country where men drink and gamble far too much, and are fast in the clutches of these vices before they realize them as bad habits. It was not for nothing that she was Derek Liscannon's daughter and Derry Liscannon's sister.

She had her worries and anxieties, poor Gay, though she carried them with a stiff lip and never let the world guess how often her heart was aching behind her smile. But, of late, the worst of them had come to be in the fear that Lundi Druro was going the way so many good men go in Rhodesia—full-tilt for the rocks of moral and physical ruin.

This was the reason for her attack on him. She had long meditated something of the kind, though quite certain that he would take it badly. But she had thought that his friendship with her family and herself warranted (she knew that her love did) her doing a thing from which her soul shrank but did not retreat—hurting another human soul so as to help it to its own healing. And it had all ended in disappointment and despair. Nothing to show for it but the picture of him standing happy and gay, his eyes admiringly fixed on another woman! Perhaps the beautiful stranger would solace him for the wound Gay's hand had dealt? Who could she be? the girl wondered miserably.

But, by the next afternoon, everyone in Wankelo knew that Mrs. Hading, beautiful, unattached, and travelling for her pleasure, was staying at the "Falcon"; and Beryl Hallett, who was also staying there, had already met her and prepared a complete synopsis of her character, clothes, and manners (not to mention features, complexion, and hair) for the benefit of her friend, Gay Liscannon.

"My dear, she has lovely, weary manners and lovely, weary eyes, with an expression as if she doesn't take any interest in anything; but you bet she does!" said Beryl, whose language always contained a somewhat sporting flavour. "You bet she takes an interest in clothes and men and everything that's going! Nothing much gets past those weary eyes. And she is as chic as the deuce. Never have we seen such clothes up here. She smells so delicious, too—not scented, you know, but just little faint puffs of fragrance. I wish I knew how to do it. But I don't think you can do it without sachets in your corsets and a maid to sew them into all your clothes, and salts and perfumes for your bath, and plenty of tin to keep it all going! Blow! How can poverty-stricken wretches like us contend with that kind of thing, I'd like to know?"

"We don't have to contend with it," said Gay indifferently.

The two girls were sitting in Berlie's mother's private sitting-room upstairs. Gay was in riding-kit and had come to beguile Berlie to go for a canter.

"Oh, don't we?" said the latter emphatically. "You should just see the pile of men that came in to lunch here today—just to have a look at her. The story of her glory has gone forth. She came over to our table and asked if we minded if she sat with us, and then she wound her lovely manners all around mother so that mum thinks she's a dream and an angel. But I don't cotton to her much, Gay—and I can feel she doesn't like me, either, though she was as sweet as honey. My dear, she will nobble all our men—I feel it in my bones."

"Let her," said Gay listlessly.

"She even has old Lundi Druro crumpled up—what do you think of that?" Gay's charming face turned to a mask. "That gives you an idea of her power," continued Beryl dolorously, "if she can keep Lundi Druro amused. She is sitting in the lounge with him now. They've been there ever since lunch, and he was to have gone out to his mine early this morning."

Gay jumped up from her chair.

"Are you coming for that ride or not, Berlie? I'm sick of scorching indoors." There were, indeed, two spots of flame in her cheeks.

"Oh, Gay, I can't; I am too G. I. for anything." "G. I." is Rhodesian for "gone in," a common condition for both men and women and things in that sprightly land of nicknames and nick-phrases.

"I'm off, then," said Gay hurriedly.

"Wait a minute—I'll come down with you!" said Beryl, and, rushing to the mirror over the mantel, began to pat her pretty cendrÉ hair flat to her head, in unconscious imitation of Mrs. Hading's coiffure.

The two girls went downstairs together. Beryl's arm thrust through her friend's. Gay's horse stood at the side entrance, facing the staircase. She instinctively quickened her pace as they reached the lounge door, but, before she could pass, it opened, and Mrs. Hallett came out.

"Oh, I was just coming to look for you girls. Mrs. Scott is in from
Umvuma, Gay, and dying to see you."

Gay gave an inward groan. Mrs. Scott was an old friend of her dead mother's, and about the only woman in the world for whom the girl would have entered the lounge at that moment. As it was, she followed Beryl's mother swiftfoot through the swing door, very upright and smart in her glossy tan riding-boots, knee-breeches, and graceful long coat of soft tan linen. In the matter of riding-kit, Gay always went nap. A ball or day gown she might wear until it fell off her back, but when it came to habits, she considered nothing too good or too recent for her.

For a moment, Marice Hading looked away from the man who sat opposite, amusing her with apt and cynical reflections on life in Rhodesia, and shot a soft, dark glance at the straight back of the girl in riding-kit. Her cleverly appraising eye took in, with the instantaneousness of photography, every detail of Gay's get-up, and her brain acknowledged that she had seldom seen a better one either in Central Park or Rotten Row. But no expression of any such opinion showed in her weary, disdainful eyes or found its way to her lips, for in the art of using language to conceal her thoughts, Marice Hading had few rivals. What she said to Druro, whose glance had also wandered that way, was:

"One cannot help noticing what a hard-riding, healthy-looking crowd the women of this country are."

The words sounded like a simple, frank statement; but somehow they robbed Gay of some of the perfection of her young and charming ensemble, and made her one of a crowd in which her distinction was lost. Druro felt this vaguely without being able to tell exactly how it happened. He knew nothing of the subtleties of a woman's mind. He had thought that Gay looked rather splendidly young and sweet, and, because of it, a fresh pang shot through him at the remembrance of her scornful dismissal of him the night before. But, with Mrs. Hading's words, the impression passed, and he got a quick vision of Gay as just an ordinary girl who had been extremely rude to him. This helped him to meet with equanimity the calm, clear glance she sent through him.

"Don't you know the little riding girl?" asked Mrs. Hading softly, but something in Druro's surprised expression made her cover the question with a faintly admiring remark: "She's quite good-looking, I think. Who is she?"

"The daughter of an old friend of mine—a Colonel Liscannon," said Druro, speaking in a low voice and rapidly. He would have preferred not to discuss Gay at all, but his natural generosity impelled him to accord her such dignity and place as belonged to her and not to leave her where Mrs. Hading's words seemed to place her—just the other side of some fine, invisible line.

"Ah, one of the early pioneers? They were all by way of being captains and colonels, weren't they?" murmured Marice Hading, still weaving fine, invisible threads.

Druro frowned slightly. "Colonel Liscannon is an old service-man——"

"May I beg for one of those delicious cigarettes you were smoking after lunch?" she said languidly. "And do tell where to get some like them. I find it so difficult to get anything at all smokable up here, except from your clubs."

Thus, Colonel Liscannon and his daughter were gracefully consigned to the limbo of subjects not sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of Mrs. Hading. If she could not, by reason of Druro's natural chivalry, put Gay just over the wrong side of some subtle social line she had drawn, she could, at least, thrust her out of the conversation altogether and out of Druro's mind. This was always a pastime she found fascinating—pushing someone out of a man's mind and taking the empty place herself—and one at which long practice had made her nearly perfect. So it is not astonishing that she succeeded so well with Druro that, when Gay left her friends and slipped out to her waiting horse, he did not even notice her going. He was busy trying to persuade Mrs. Hading to come for a spin around the Wankelo kopje in his car, and he was not unsuccessful. Only, they went further than the kopje. About six miles out they got a glimpse of a solitary rider ahead, going like the wind. A cloud of soft, ashen dust rising from under the horse's heels floated back and settled like the gentle dew from heaven upon the car and its occupants. Druro was on the point of slackening speed, but Mrs. Hading's pencilled brows met in a line above her eyes, and one of her little white teeth showed in her underlip.

"Get past her, please," she said coldly. "I object to other people's dust."

Druro was about to object in his turn, though, for a moment, he philandered with the delightful thought of getting even with Gay by covering her with dust and petrol fumes. Unfortunately, his gallant resistance to this pleasant temptation would never be known, for Gay suddenly and unexpectedly wheeled to the left and put her horse's head to the veld. The swift wheeling movement, with its attendant extra scuffling of dust, sent a further graceful contribution of fine dirt on to the occupants of the car. It would have been difficult to accuse Gay of doing it on purpose, however, for she appeared blandly unconscious of the neighbourhood of fellow beings. She gave a little flick of her whip, and away she went over a great burnt-out patch of veld, leaving the long, white, dusty road to those who had no choice but to take it.

Mrs. Hading did not love Gay Liscannon any better for her score, but she would have disliked her in any case. Because she was no longer young herself, youth drove at her heart like a poisoned dagger. One of the few keen pleasures she had left in life was to bare her foils to the attack of some inexperienced girl, to match her wit and art and beauty against a fresh cheek and ingenuous heart, and prove to the world that victory was still to her. But when she had done it, victory was dust in her palm and bitter in her mouth as dead-sea apples. For she knew that the wolf of middle age was at her door.

Marice Hading was one of those unhappy women who have drained to the dregs every cup of pleasure they can wrench from life and fled from the healing cup of pain. Now, with the chilly and uncompromising hand of forty clutching at her, pain was always with her—not ennobling, chastening pain, but the pain of those who, having been overfull, must henceforth go empty.

Small wonder that, weary-eyed and dry-souled, she roamed the earth in feverish search of solace and refreshment. Her husband, a generous, affectionate man, condemned by her selfishness to a waste of arid years empty of wife-love or children, had died of overwork, dyspepsia, and general dissatisfaction some eight years before, leaving his widow with an income of two thousand pounds a year, a sum she found all too small for her requirements.

In her fashion, she had been in love several times during her widowhood, but never sufficiently so to surrender her liberty. Horror of child-bearing and a passion for the care and cultivation of her own beauty were further reasons for not succumbing to the temptation to take another man slave in marriage. She had contented herself with holding the hearts of the men who loved her in her hands and squeezing them dry of every drop of devotion and self-sacrifice they could generate.

But the harvest of hearts was giving out, and the wolf was at the door. She had had very bad luck in the last year or two. The hearts that had come her way were as selfish as her own, and knew how to slip elusively from greedy little hands, without yielding too much. For a long time it had seemed to her that the world had become bankrupt of big, generous-giving hearts, and that there were no more little games of life worth playing. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she happened upon Wankelo, a green spot in the desert. Here were girls to act as counters in the game she loved to play, and here, too, unless she were grievously mistaken, was a man who had the best of sport to offer. With the hunter's sure instinct for the prey, she recognized unerringly the big, generous qualities of Druro's nature. Here was a heart that could be made to suffer and to give. Besides, he was extremely good-looking. She felt a kind of hopeful certainty that he could offer her jaded heart something new in the way of emotions.

In consideration of these things, she decided to pitch her tent for a while in Wankelo. Selukine could wait. Her projected visit there was, in any case, only one of speculation and curiosity. She had heard of the place as being thick with small gold mines closed down for want of capital, and it had occurred to her that the possibility of finding a gold mine cheaply, and a capitalist for nothing at all, was quite on the cards. Besides, discreet inquiry, or, rather, discreet listening to the frank discussion of other people's affairs, which is one of the features of Rhodesian life, had elicited the happy information that Druro was on the way to becoming a very wealthy man. The Leopard reef, report said, was making bigger and richer at every blast, and the expectation was that it would be the richest thing in the way of mines that Rhodesia had yet known. Luck, like nature, has her darlings.

The Leopard mine was Druro's own property and the darling of his heart, next to his dog Toby. He had taken forty thousand pounds sterling from it in one year and spent it in another. That was the time he stayed away a whole year among the lamp-posts, "forgot" to get married, and came back without a bean. He declared there were plenty more forty thousands to be got out of the Leopard, and perhaps there were, but, unfortunately, during his absence the reef had been lost. As he was the only man who believed it would ever be found again, he had encountered some difficulty in getting together sufficient capital to restart the mine, for, of course, it had been shut down on the loss of the reef. But, on the strength of his personality, he had succeeded where most men would have failed. After many months, operations were in full swing. It was said that the mine was panning three ounces over a width of four-six, and a strike of a thousand feet proved, with the reef at the bottom of the shaft, richer and stronger than ever. But Druro himself gave away little information on the subject, beyond admitting sometimes in the bitters-time before dinner at the club, that the mine was looking all right. Rumour did the rest.

For a few days after Mrs. Hading's arrival, Lundi Druro disappeared from every-day life in Wankelo. It was a way he had of doing, and everyone who sought him at such times would find him at the Leopard in pants embroidered with great holes burned into them by cyanide and acids, a disreputable shirt without any buttons or collar, and face and hands blackened beyond recognition with the machine-oil and grime inseparable from a large mining plant. He always did his own assaying, taking both time and trouble over it. It must certainly be admitted that, if he knew how to play when he played, he also worked some when he worked.

During this time, Mrs. Hading was busy in many ways, but chiefly in winding her lovely manners about people whom she decided would be useful to her, and prosecuting a further acquaintance with Beryl Hallett and Gay Liscannon. It was quite unavoidable that she and Gay should meet, however averse they might be to one another, and each accepted the fact with an outward calm that gave no indication of inward fires. Mrs. Hading was charming to Gay, as was her invariable practice while searching for chinks in the opponent's armour. Her hands blessed, even while her fingers were busy feeling for the soft spots in the victim's skull. Gay, on her side, was pleasant, polite, and interested, while guarding her heart behind a barrier as fine as a shirt of steel mail. For, though of a frank and generous disposition, she was not a fool, and life had taught her a few things about the attitude of mind of most pretty unattached women toward young girls in the same case.

At eleven o'clock one morning, they were all gathered round Mrs. Hallett's tea-table—Gay, Berlie, Mrs. Hading, and several men, for 11 A.M. is the "off" hour in Rhodesia, when everyone leaves his business, if he has any, to take tea in the pleasantest society he can find. At Wankelo, most people sallied forth to the lounge of the "Falcon," the club-room of the town, where morning tea was a ceremony, almost a rite.

Someone had just remarked on the prolonged absence of Lundi Druro when his car rolled up to the door, and, a moment later he strolled in and came over to the circle of tea-drinkers, cool and peaceful in their white clothes and shady hats. Unfortunately, his dog, Toby, chose this as a suitable occasion for saying a few pleasant words to Gay's dog, Weary. In a moment chairs were being pushed out of the way; teacups and scones and buttered toast were flying in every direction; men were tangled up with a revolving, growling mass of black and brown fur, and half a dozen feminine voices were crying pitifully:

"Oh, save Toby!" "Don't let Weary kill him!" "Poor little Toby, he has no teeth!"

Toby was not the dog Druro had fished out of the Lundi River—to that bull-terrier there had been many successors, and all had come to bad and untimely ends. Druro, indeed, had sworn that he would never acquire another dog; but Toby had sprung from none knew whence and acquired him. He was a little black, limping fellow of no breed at all, whose eyes had grown filmy from long gazing at Lundi Druro as if he were a sun-god or something that dazzled the vision. He usually carried a sacrificial offering in the shape of an enormous stone culled on his travels, and, with this in his mouth, would sit for hours, gazing at his god playing poker or otherwise engaged. The only time he relinquished this stone was when he had a fight on hand, a rather frequent occurrence, as his perpetual limp and partially chewed-off ears testified. For, though his teeth were worn away by the stone-habit, he had a soul of steel and was afraid of nothing in the dog line. Gay's dog was one of those from whom he would stand no nonsense, and they never met without attempting to settle their feud for once and all. Druro usually settled it by banging Weary on the nose until he let go, for the latter was a powerful beast, and if allowed to work his wicked way, Toby would not have had a hope. But today, for some reason known to himself, Druro had an objection to hitting Gay's dog and contented himself with wrenching Weary's jaws apart, a dangerous and not very easy feat to accomplish. Weary, however, came in for several sound kicks and cuffs from other directions, and his mistress was in by no means an angelic frame of mind by the time she had her champion safe back between her knees, held by his collar.

"Why don't you keep your wretched little mongrel at home?" she inquired bitterly of Druro.

"It's a free country," responded Lundi blandly, wiping his damp brow and Toby's bloody ear with the same handkerchief. "You should train your bully to go for dogs of his own size."

"You know Toby always starts it."

"Well, I don't say he doesn't," admitted Druro. "But he does it on principle. He's a born reformer—aren't you, Tobe? Picks a scrap with any one he considers a disreputable, dissipated character." Toby's master smiled mockingly at Weary's mistress.

"Reformation, like charity, should begin at home," she flashed back, and the instant she had uttered the words could have bitten off her tongue. For everyone was smiling delightedly. A few quarrels and scandals give a zest to life in Rhodesia, and are always warmly welcomed. No one knew the real foundation of Gay's and Druro's misunderstanding, but it had been plain for some time that there was one.

"We were talking about getting up a picnic," said peace-loving Mrs.
Hallett. "Mrs. Hading must be shown a real Rhodesian picnic."

"I want it to be a moonlight one!" cried Berlie. "They are twice as much fun."

"Yes; but there won't be a moon for nearly a month," someone complained.

"Well, we must have a day picnic now, and a moonlight one next month.
We shall want your car, Lundi."

"You can have it any time. Where do you think of going?"

"Either to Sombwelo Forest or Selukine."

Everyone agreed that Mrs. Hading must see both of these lovely places.

"I have to go to Selukine anyway, on business," said Mrs. Hading, who
had no idea of letting her plan to motor through that district in
Druro's company be interfered with by picnics, "so please let it be
Sombwelo."

"You can have my ranch there as a base of operations," proffered Lundi, "and make my boys do the work."

They all applauded this except Gay, who submitted that a picnic was not a picnic unless conducted on alfresco lines, with all the cooking and eating done out of doors by the picnickers themselves. Druro understood that she objected to his ranch and was sorry he had spoken, especially as some of the others looked at her with understanding eyes also. However, she was outvoted, everyone crying that if she liked hard work and out-door cooking, and spiders and ants running over the table-cloth and mosquitoes biting her ankles, she could have them, but they would have the ranch. To Druro's surprise and relief, she laughed and gave in quite pleasantly. Being a man, he could not know that, at that very moment, she was dismally deciding that, considering all that had passed, she could not possibly go to Druro's ranch.

"I shall have to be taken ill at the last moment," she reflected, and could have wept, for she loved picnics, and Druro's ranch had a secret call for her heart. But she laughed instead, and helped, with a cheerful air, to draw up the lists of those who were to supply cars, chickens, cakes, crockery, and all the other incidentals that go to the making of a successful picnic. The tea-party had by this time become enlarged to the size of a reception, and with everybody talking and arguing at once, no one (except Gay) noticed that, after a little quiet conversation, Mrs. Hading and Druro withdrew and disappeared. It transpired later that they had ordered an early lunch and started for Selukine in the Argyle.

And that was only the beginning of it. In the week that followed, it became more usual to see Mrs. Hading in Lundi Druro's car than out of it.

Gay, staunch to her resolve, absented herself from the festivity at Sombwelo. It was no great exaggeration to plead that she was ill, for her spirit was sick if her body was not. But no one spared her the details of a successful and delightful day. It seemed that Druro had been a perfect host and Mrs. Hading a graceful and gracious guest. And, from that time forward, never a day passed in which the two did not spend some, at least, of its hours together. When Marice was not by Druro's side in the big red car, sometimes learning to drive, sometimes just tearing through the air, en route to some mine or other which she wanted to see, they might be found in the "Falcon" lounge, playing bridge with another couple or just sitting alone, talking of London lamp-posts. Sometimes they played two-handed poker, for Marice not only sympathized but shared with Druro his passion for cards. Perhaps this drew their hearts as well as their heads together. At any rate, to lookers-on they seemed absorbed in one another.

Mrs. Hading essayed skilfully and very winningly to draw Gay into her intimate circle, and it vexed her to realize how she evaded her plans. Berlie, she had already subjugated and made a tool of; but Gay stood aloof and would not be beguiled. While perfectly courteous to Mrs. Hading and whole-heartedly admiring her beauty, she had yet distrusted and disliked her from the first. Now her dislike deepened, for she saw that the widow was harming Druro. She kept him from his work, and sympathized and pandered to the passions that already too greatly obsessed him. There were always cocktails and cards on the table before them. Druro was drawing closer round him the net of his weaknesses from which Gay had so longed to drag him forth. Between the latter and Lundi Druro there now existed a kind of armed peace which appeared to be based, on his side, in indifference, and, on hers, in pride. There was often open antagonism in their eyes as they faced each other. She despised him for lingering and lagging at the heels of pleasure, and he knew it. Sometimes, when he was not actively angry with her, he thought she had grown older and sadder in a short while, and wondered if she were having trouble about young Derry, who was up-country, or whether old Derek was going the pace more than usual at home. It must be these secret troubles, he thought, that had suddenly changed her from the laughing girl he knew into a rather beautiful but cold woman. Cold, yes, cold as the east wind! Sometimes her clear eyes chilled him like the air of a certain little cold hour of the dawn that he very much dreaded; it was a relief to turn away from them to the warm and subtle scents and frondlike ways of Marice Hading.

For weeks now, he had divided his time so carefully between Mrs. Hading and poker at the club, that there was nothing at all left for the Leopard mine. His partner, M. R. Guthrie, commonly known as "Emma," sometimes came from the mine to look for him, pedalling moodily into Wankeloon a bicycle, and always pedalling away more moodily than he came. He was a shrivelled-up American with a biting tongue, and the only man in the country from whom Druro would take back talk.

"What is this wine-woman-and-song stunt you are on now, Lundi?" he inquired, late one night, when he had cornered Druro in the club with a small but select poker-party of the hardest citizens in the country. Druro gave him a dark glance.

"That's my business," he said curtly.

"Have you any other business?" asked Emma bitterly. "You don't happen to own a mine, I suppose?"

"What are mines compared to jack-pots?" inquired Druro gravely. "Besides, what are you on that mine for, Emma? A decoration? Or do you think you are my wet-nurse? I don't remember engaging you in that capacity."

Guthrie rose, offended.

"All right, my boy—go to blazes your own way!"

"I can get there without leading-strings, anyway," Lundi retorted cheerfully.

"But not without apron-strings," muttered his partner, departing on the faithful bicycle. "I dunno what's come to the fellow!"

In truth, Druro hardly knew himself. A kind of fever had taken possession of him, a fever of unrest and discontent with himself and all things. He couldn't remember how it began or when, but it seemed to him that life, in one moment, from being interesting and vivid, had turned old and cold and tasted like a rotten apple in his mouth. And he did not care how many drinks he took to wash the flavour away. He knew that he was drinking too much and neglecting his work, and jeopardizing other people's money as well as his own by so doing, but his soul was filled with a bitter carelessness and indifference to these facts. He was anxious not to inquire too deeply within himself on the matter of what ailed him, being dimly aware of a something at the back of his mind that could inform him only too well. He wished to avoid all discussion with that something, sitting like a veiled, watching figure, waiting for some unoccupied hour. Up to now, he had been very successful in dodging the appointment, but he had premonition that he would be caught one of these days soon—in some little cold dawn-hour perhaps.

There came a day when Mrs. Hading decided to return the hospitality shown her in Wankelo by giving an entertainment of her own. She mentioned her intention lightly to Druro.

"I really must try and arrange to give a little jolly of my own in return for all the big jollies people here have given me."

In reality, she had determined on something in the nature of "a surprise to the natives" that would put all their little picnics and dinner-parties entirely in the shade, and duly impress not only Wankelo but Rhodesia and, incidentally, Lundi Druro. For, after several weeks of close intercourse with the latter, she had come to the conclusion that she might do very much worse than marry him. More, she actually desired to do so. The stimulus of his insouciant gaiety and originality, good looks and unfailingly good spirits had come to be a necessary part of her existence. She needed him now, like a bracing cocktail she had grown used to taking so many times a day and could no longer do without. Besides, the Leopard was panning out well, at the rate of a thousand pounds sterling per month, and had the prospect of doing far better.

These were good enough reasons for Mrs. Hading's decision that Druro, as well as Wankelo, should be impressed by the finished splendour and grace of her "little jolly." She intended to show him that, when it came to choosing a wife who could spend his thousands graciously and to the best effect, he could never do better than Marice Hading. To which end, she concentrated her whole mind on the purpose of making her entertainment a complete and conspicuous success.

A little group of those people whom she favoured with her intimacy were called into council, theoretically to help her with advice, though in practice she needed little of them but admiring applause. They met every morning in a corner of the lounge which, by introducing her own flowers, books, and cushions, she had made peculiarly hers. Here over morning tea the plans for her "jolly" were projected and perfected, and here were always to be found Berlie Hallett and her mother, Cora Lisle, Johnny Doran, Major Maturin, and one or two lesser but useful lights.

Druro, though he did little more than decorate the assembly with his good-tempered smile, was a most necessary feature of it, and Dick Tryon was more often than not to be found there also, though whether he came to scoff or bless, no one was quite certain. His position in the circle of Mrs. Hading's satellites had never been clearly defined. He was supposed by some people to be hopelessly in love with Gay Liscannon, and that supposition alone was enough to make Marice Hading anxious to attach him to her personal staff. Besides, he was an interesting man and a clever lawyer—always a useful combination in a friend. At any rate, he was one of those who helped to applaud the programme of Mrs. Hading's jolly, which she eventually decided was to take the form of a bridge tournament followed by supper and a dance.

This sounds a simple enough affair, but, under Mrs. Hading's treatment, it became rarefied. A chef for the supper had been commanded from Johannesburg, a string orchestra for the dance from Salisbury, and exquisite bridge prizes were being sent from a jeweller's at the Cape. The hotel dining-room was to be transformed into a salon for the card tournament, the lounge decorated as a ballroom, and an enormous marquee erected for the supper.

The day dawned at last when, all these arrangements being completed, there was nothing for the select council to do but congratulate each other on the prospect of a perfect evening. Druro, however, who had for some days been showing (to the initiated eyes of his male friends, at least) signs of restlessness, not to say boredom, marred the harmony of this propitious occasion by absenting himself, thereby causing the president of the meeting palpable inquietude and displeasure. She missed her laughing cavalier, as she had a fancy for calling him, from her retinue. Plainly distraite, she sat twisting her jewelled fingers and casting restless glances toward the door until certain emissaries, who had been sent forth, returned with the news that no one had seen Druro since eleven o'clock the night before, when he had gone off in a car with some mining men. The widow hid her annoyance under a pretty, petulant smile and the remark:

"He must be given a penance this afternoon." After which she abruptly dismissed the audience until tea-time.

When tea-time came, however, with its gathering in Mrs. Hallett's sitting-room (the lounge being in preparation for the evening's festivities), there was still no Druro. Further inquiry had elicited the fact that the men he had gone off with were from the Glendora. The Glendora was a mine owned by an Australian syndicate and run entirely by Australians, a hard-living, hard-drinking crowd, who, by reason of their somewhat notorious ways and also because none of them had wives, were left rather severely alone by the Wankelo community. One or two of the managers, however, belonged to the club, and it was with these that Druro had disappeared.

Mrs. Hading, whose petulance was not quite so pretty as in the morning, rather gathered than was told these things, and she saw very plainly that she had not gathered all there was to tell. Men have a curious way of standing back to back when women want to find out too much. But she did not need a great deal of enlightening, and when a man said with careless significance, "I expect he has forgotten all about tonight," and the other men's eyes went blank, she guessed what was at the bottom of it all. She had learned by now what were the occasions on which Druro so poignantly forgot, and she was furious, not because gambling might be bad for his bank account or his immortal soul, but that he should dare to have a more burning interest than herself.

"What about sending someone to remind him?" suggested Maturin. Marice
Hading regarded him coldly.

"He is engaged to open the ball with me this evening. I do not think he is likely to forget." There was more than a ring of arrogance in her tone, and, looking straight past him into the eyes of Gay Liscannon, she added acridly, "Whomsoever he may have thus distinguished in the past."

Gay, who, by some mischance, had happened accidentally upon the meeting, was taken off her guard by this direct attack, as the ready flush in her cheek clearly told. A moment later, she was her pale, calm self. But Mrs. Hading saw that her arrow shot at a venture had drawn blood. She really knew nothing of Gay's quarrel with Druro, and her venture was based on a remark Berlie had let fall. But she was aware of a shadow between Gay and Druro that her sharp and curious eyes had never been able to penetrate, and that infuriated her. Tryon, lazily examining his shoes, here interposed a casual remark.

"I am willing to prophesy that what has happened once can happen again—in spite of William De Morgan."

It was Marice Hading's turn to flush.

"If I do not dance with Mr. Druro tonight, it will not be because he is absent," she said, with cold arrogance.

"Nous verrons," he answered agreeably. She gave him an insolent look. He had declared sides at last, and she knew where she stood.

Gay dressed for the dance with but little enthusiasm. Pride made her put aside her longing to stay at home with her own wretchedness—pride and bitter curiosity, but, above all, a haunting fear of what the evening might bring forth. She had a strange premonition that something final and fatal was going to happen to her love for Druro. It was to be given its death-thrust, perhaps, by the announcement of an engagement between him and the widow. Surely, Marice Hading's significance had meant that if it had meant anything! This fete was to be the scene of her triumph. She meant to brandish Druro as a trophy—fastening him publicly to the wheels of her chariot. Strangely enough, what Gay dreaded still more was that Druro would not turn up at all. She felt a miserable foreboding about the gang at Glendora. And it was based on good grounds. They had once lured her brother Derry out to that camp, and what he had told her of his experiences there had left her with a wholesome dread and detestation of the Australians.

"I wonder I got out with my skin," said Derry. "They rooked me right and left. There isn't a finer set of sharpers outside of Mexico City—and the whole gang ready to eat you up alive if you show by the twitch of an eyelash that you are 'on' to them. There's one pirate there—Capperne—who's worse than all the rest. Nothing can beat him. You know he's sharping you all the time, but he's so slick you can never catch him out. And it wouldn't be wise to, either."

These were the men that Druro had gone out to play poker with—Lundi Druro, with his love of fair play and easily roused temper and carelessness of consequences. It was a heavy and apprehensive heart that the girl hooked up inside her ball gown.

The "Falcon" was a fairy-land of softly shaded lights and flowers of every shade of yellow and gold. Few flowers except those of the hardiest kinds could be got in any quantity at Wankelo, so Mrs. Hading had cleverly decided to use only those of one colour, choosing sunflowers, marigolds, and all the little yellow children of the Zinnia family. These, mingled with the tender green of maidenhair fern, of which quantities had been obtained from Selukine, massed against walls draped with green, made an exquisite setting for her entertainment and her own beauty. She glided here and there among the amber lights, welcoming her guests and setting them at the little green-clad card tables, a diaphanous vision of gold-and-orange chiffons, her perfect neck and shoulders ablaze with diamonds, and her little flat-coiffed black head, rather snakelike on its long throat, banded by a chain of yellow topazes.

Everything blended in the picture she had made for herself, and the picture was perfect to behold. But, unfortunately, the person whom it had been created chiefly to impress was missing. Druro had not come.

The bridge tournament waned to an end, and the dainty and expensive prizes were awarded; the guests flowed in a gentle, happy tide to the supper marquee and partook of such a collation of aspics and salads, and soufflÉs and truffles, and such a divine brew of cup and amazing brand of cocktails as Wankelo had never before dreamed of in its philosophy; then back they ebbed, more happily and hilariously than they had flowed, to the ballroom, where, on the stroke of midnight, the special string orchestra from Salisbury strung out sweet, tremolo opening bars of the first waltz. And Druro had not come!

Mrs. Hading gracefully surrendered herself to the arms of a great man who had been obliging enough to drop in accidentally by the evening train from Buluwayo, and, floating down the room, opened the ball. Her partner was a very great man indeed, both in South African and English politics, and it was a feather of no small jauntiness in Marice Hading's cap that she had been able to secure him for the vacant seat at her supper-table and afterward beguile him to the ballroom and into asking her to dance. His presence lent a final note of distinction to an extraordinarily successful evening, and she had every reason to be proud and triumphant—except one! But it was that one thing that poisoned all. No triumph could quench her rage and humiliation at Druro's defection.

"He shall pay! He shall pay!" were the words that beat time in her brain, all the while she was floating and gliding among her guests, full of graceful, weary words and charming, tired smiles, the only colour in her face showing on her bitter lips.

"He shall pay me my price for this," she promised herself softly, "and it shall not be a light one."

(Hugh Hading had paid his price for her girlhood; Lundi Druro should pay for the rest of her life!)

Only one thing could put her right with her own pride and before the little world which had witnessed the slight, and that she would exact—the announcement that he was hers, body and soul, to do with as she pleased. That the honour would be an empty one, this evening's dÉroute would seem to have demonstrated; he had proved once more that he was no man's man, and no woman's man, either; he belonged to his sins, and his weaknesses, and his failings. But, for the moment, it would be enough for Marice Hading that he should propose to her and be accepted. Her time would come later—afterward. There were many modes of recompense of which she was past mistress, many subtle means of repayment for injuries received. Such a mind as hers was not lacking in refined methods of inflicting punishment. It would be proved to him, in bitter retribution, that Marice Hading could not be trifled with and neglected—forgotten for a game of cards!

In the meantime, she eased her anger a little by snubbing Tryon, when he came to claim a waltz she had given him early in the week. Looking at him with cool and lovely disdain as she leaned on the arm of the great politician who still lingered with her, she disclaimed all recollection of any such engagement.

"You should be careful not to make such mistakes, Mr. Tryon," she said haughtily.

"Soit! The mistake is mine as well as the loss," he murmured gracefully, knowing very well what was his real crime. "But prophets must be prepared for losses. In olden days they have even been known to lose their heads for prophesying too truly." And on that he made a bow, and returned to Gay, whom he had left in their sitting-out place, which was his car. She had danced but little all the evening and seemed lost in dark thoughts.

"Tired?" he asked, leaning on the door beside her.

"No; but I'm sick of this dance," she said fiercely. "Take me for a spin, Dick."

"Right. But the roads are pretty bad in the dark, you know."

Gay pondered a moment.

"The Selukine road isn't bad"—she paused a moment, then slowly added, "and the road to Glendora."

It was Tryon's turn to ponder. The road to the Glendora was the worst in the country, but it didn't take him long to read the riddle.

"Come on, then!" he said abruptly. "Shall I get your cloak?"

"No; let me wear your things, Dick." She took up a big motor-coat and deer-stalker from the driving-seat and slipped into them. The rose-pink gown disappeared and was lost under the darkness of tweed, and the cap covered her bright hair. She sat well back in the shadows of the tonneau.

Tryon set the car going, climbed moodily into the lonely driving-seat, and steered away into the darkness just as the music stopped and a crowd of dancers came pouring out of the ballroom.

The Glendora lay west of the town, and the road to it ran past the club. As luck would have it, a man coming from the latter place, and pushing a bicycle before him, almost collided with them, causing Tryon to pull up short.

"Is that you, Emma Guthrie?" he called irritably.

"Yep!" came the gloomy answer.

"Seen anything of Lundi?"

"Nope!" on a deeper tone of gloom. Gay touched Tryon's shoulder.

"Make him come, too," she whispered.

"I'm just taking a run out to the Glendora," announced Tryon. "Want to come?"

"I do," said Guthrie, with laconic significance, and climbed in beside the driver. They flipped through the night at thirty miles an hour, which was as much as Tryon dared risk on such a road. The Glendora was about ten miles off. Gay, furled in the big coat and kindly darkness, could hear the two men exchanging an occasional low word, but little was said. It was doubtful whether Guthrie knew who Tryon's other passenger was.

In time, the clanking and pounding of a battery smote their ears, and the twinkling myriad lights of a mining camp were spread across the darkness. One large wood-and-iron house, standing alone on rising ground, well back from the road, was conspicuously brilliant. The doors were closed, but lights and the sound of men's voices raised in an extraordinary uproar streamed from its open, unblinded windows and fanlights. Abruptly Tryon turned the car so that it faced for home, halted it in the shadow of some trees, and jumping out, strode toward the house, followed by Guthrie and Gay.

Almost as they reached it, the door was flung open, and a man came out and stood in the light. He was passing his hand over his eyes and through his hair in an odd gesture that would have told Gay who he was, even if every instinct in her had not recognized Druro. The pandemonium in the house had fallen suddenly to a great stillness, but as Guthrie and Tryon reached the house, it broke forth again with increased violence, and a number of men rushed out and laid hands on Druro as if to detain him. He flung them off in every direction; a couple of them fell scrambling and swearing over the low rail of the veranda. Then, several spoken sentences, terse, and clean-cut as cameos, fell on the night air.

"Come on home, Lundi; we have a car here."

"I tell you he has killed Capperne! Capperne is dead as a bone!"

"All right!" came Druro's voice, cool and careless. "If he's dead, he's dead. I am prepared to accept the consequences."

The Australians stood off, grouped together, muttering. Guthrie and Tryon moved to either side of Druro, and between them he walked calmly away from the house. When they reached the car, he took the seat beside Tryon, Guthrie climbed in next to Gay, and they drove away without a word being spoken. The whole nightmare happening had passed with the precision and ease of a clockwork scene played by marionettes. Now the curtain was down, and nothing remained but the haunting, fateful words still ringing in the ears of them all. Small wonder they sat silent as death. As the car entered the precincts of the town, Druro said to Tryon:

"I must go to the police camp and report this thing, Dick. But, first drive to the 'Falcon,' will you? I've just remembered that I had an appointment there and must go and apologize."

They drew up at a side entrance of the hotel and Druro stepped out and turned almost mechanically to open the door for those behind. So far he had shown no knowledge of Gay's presence, but he now looked straight into her eyes without any sign of surprise. He held out his hand to help her to descend, and, in the same instant, swiftly withdrew it.

"I forgot," he said, and, for an instant, stood staring at his palm and then at her in a dazed, musing sort of way. "There is blood upon it!"

Gay could not speak. Her heart felt breaking. It seemed to her that, in that moment, with the shadow of crime on him, he had suddenly changed into a bright-haired, innocent, wistful boy. She longed, with an infinite, brooding love that was almost maternal, to shelter and comfort him against all the world. But she could do nothing. Even if she could have spoken, there was nothing to say. Only, on an impulse, she caught the hand he had drawn back, and, for a moment, held it close between her warm, generous little palms. Then she slipped away into the darkness, and he went into the hotel, walking like a man in a dream.