The Scent of the Rose

Give me from the sky afar
Every little tiny star.
Give me the sun at its noon,
And the magical moon;
All the pain of life and all its bliss.
Ah! Every blossom that blows,
All the scent of the rose:
I will give it back in one long kiss.
Gipsy Love

Chapter I

Pauline

The heart of a child is the smile of God!

One of the nuns in the convent where Pauline was brought up had christened her Pippa. Not because there was anything Italian in any of them, only Sister Augustine, who in the days before her vocation had been a great reader of Browning, still, remained a lover of his clear sharp truth in God.

“Oh day, if I squander a wavelet of thee!”

Sister Augustine felt that that was essentially Pauline’s outlook on life. Small and vivid and radiant coloured, the child danced through their rather sober days of early matins, humble work and long devotions, shedding round her the gaiety of life, the light-heartedness of laughter that is only possible to the very young!

Not that the nuns, four of them in number, were of themselves sober or grey minded. They took their pleasures in such simple things that their laughter when it came was really akin to a child’s. It was only that Pauline was so radiantly glad to be alive, thought the world so marvellously beautiful and good to dance through, and that Sister Augustine and Sister Marta and Sister Veronica had all reached to the haven of religion because of the bitterness that they had found in life. They were only happy because they had shut their eyes to the vice and cruelty of the world. It was the Mother Superior who came nearest to Pauline in her gay appreciation of life. Mother Magdalene had become a nun because as a girl she had so loved God that the love of Him had satisfied all her needs. And there is no doubt about it that those who love God see the world as more beautiful, find happiness a more lasting treasure and laughter deeper in their hearts than those who merely serve, however arduous and humble the serving may be.

All this is, one might say, apart from Pauline, or Pippa, as the nuns loved to call her, except that it may in some way serve to show how the love of all things came to be implanted in her heart and how she remained through much that was evil and hurtful a child in mind and laughter.

The four nuns and Pauline lived in their low rambling house of sun-baked bricks and straw thatch, on the slope of the foothills that rise, curve against curve, till they reach the steep upward incline of the Ruwenzori Mountains. A quaint place for a nunnery, one would say, this heart of Central Africa, with its wild beauty, its vivid colouring, its raging storms and brilliant sun. But Christianity, as vouched for by Roman Catholic and Protestant Missions, has ventured into the very remotest places of Africa and found therein a fruitful field of labour and success.

One says success, and pauses on the word. In how much are the tenets of Christianity acceptable to the African mind? How does the White Cross fit in against that sombre background of grim hills, tropical forests and primeval swamps? Nature seems singularly evil in Africa! Men, poor pigmies in the fight, struggle against stupendous odds. There are miles upon miles of trackless forest which no sun can penetrate, no rain wash clean. The hills are ringed with thunder, rarely lifting their great heights free from grey clouds; shaking fierce storms loose upon a quaking heart. And everywhere insect life, ugly, repellent, lives triumphantly, and eats its way into the work of men’s hands. Until Christianity came, the natives had no religion. They worshipped devils and spirits, the thunder that rolls about the hills, the mighty forces that at times take and shake their world. Until Christianity came—now it is almost as though the two great powers of the world stood face to face, the White Cross and the goat’s hoofs of Pan, and as to which is to conquer; the answer to that riddle lies hidden in men’s souls.

Most of all this, however, the nuns shut outside their convent walls. They seemed to have surrounded themselves with a soft, sober peace. In the garden, which ran down to the rough road from the steps of their house, English flowers grew in sweet profusion. Great-headed, fragrant-scented roses, heliotrope, stock, blue lupins and soft-faced pansies. And violets: great bunches of them making a soft carpet round the rim of the house. Behind the house there were more gardens again, almost an orchard, where an apple tree, the pride of Sister Augustine’s heart, grew side by side with oranges and lemons. And beyond the orchard again there was a piggery and the pen where the Sisters kept their long-eared French rabbits and the fowls that laid proper sized eggs for Pippa’s breakfast. So that altogether the place carried with it a homely feeling; made one dream of English gardens and farmyards, and quiet simple lives. Only the black boys who worked in the garden, clothed for the most part in rough skins, or the sleek, sly faced girls who attended Sister Veronica’s school cast a discordant note upon the atmosphere. And this the nuns never noticed. They were honestly fond of their people; and as for Pippa, her love for all things very generously and all confidingly embraced her black companions and slaves.

Pippa had come to the convent first when she was four years old. A sturdy small specimen of English childhood, with red gold hair, very gold brown eyes, and a ridiculously small—when you considered the meals she ate and the noise she made—mouth. Pippa had very little recollection of life before she came to the convent, only Sister Augustine remembered the rebellious little hands that had beaten off her kindness, the bewildered baby voice that had cried for “Mummy, Mummy” all through the greater part of one hot night. Sister Augustine had sat in the shadow, since her presence brought such stubborn anger to a baby heart, and listened to the little voice crying till it choked itself to sleep on sobs, and she had wondered whether any of the baby anguish would reach to and touch the mother-heart that had so basely deserted its child. For Sister Augustine felt the desertion to be base, knowing little of the story that lay behind it.

“We cannot judge, my dear,” Mother Magdalene had said to her. “Be very sure that in sin the woman will find her punishment. It must have begun, when in going she had to leave so much of her heart behind. I have never been a mother, yet it seems I know what she must feel.”

“There are some women,” Sister Augustine had answered hotly, “who feel nothing but their own selfish desires.”

And looking at her Mother Magdalene had smiled, shaking her head. “We cannot judge,” she had said again. “God can judge for He sees all.”

So Pippa had come to live with the Sisters. She never, from the very first, spoke to them of Mummy, nor did she after that first night raise any complaint, ask any questions. Children are more acquiescent to the inevitable than are grown-ups. Slowly the memories faded from Pippa’s mind. The memory of warm arms that used to hold her so close, of a face, to her vaguely beautiful, that had always been there had she turned to waken restlessly at night; or looked to find sympathy from any hurt or disappointment. Lost the memory too of laughter that had come so easily in answer to her own, and tears that had stirred her to such childish gusts of rage. The nuns knew Pippa’s story, but they never spoke of it to her. The outside world, the shifting, changing world of Europeans in an out-station in Africa hardly knew of the child’s existence, or, if they were made aware of it, only remembered vaguely that there had been some scandal in which someone’s wife had run away from her husband and left behind her a little girl of four.

“And that is the Hardcastle kiddie,” the most initiated would explain. “Hardcastle used to be up in these parts. He’s got a plantation, someone is managing it for him. He took the kid up to the nuns the morning after his wife left him. She has been there ever since. Rum devil, Hardcastle. I expect there was a good deal to say on the wife’s side. He isn’t a man that it would be easy for a white woman to live with for long.”

So in their final verdict the world and Mother Magdalene agreed, though they put their decision into different words.

So Pauline lived with the nuns, learnt to stammer her childish prayers at their knees, to play her solitary games under their watchful, kindly eyes.

Learnt, too, something of their broad philosophy of life, their belief that behind all the badness of the world lay the goodness of God, and, that however far poor mortals might stumble and fall, beneath them and around them were the Everlasting Arms. A good belief if you come to think of it, in an existence where failures are so numerous, pitfalls so unexpected and so deep.

And then one day when Pippa was seventeen years old Mr. Hardcastle came back to the little station that had witnessed the scene of his matrimonial disaster and took up his residence once more in the big house that stood in a wilderness of deserted garden and faced away from the snows.

His coming brought consternation to the nuns, and of this Pippa was vaguely aware. She felt it in Sister Augustine’s hands as they brushed and combed her hair to make her tidy; saw it in Mother Superior’s eyes as she stood in front of her and said :

“Pauline, my dear. Your father is in the visitors’ room. He wants to see you.”

Yet why should they feel consternation? For thirteen years her father had paid no more attention to her existence than the signing of a certain number of cheques entailed. It was unlikely that there was anything beyond an idle curiosity to see her behind this visit.

At seventeen one is quick to resent indifference. There was something akin to rebellion in Pauline’s mind as she pushed open the door of the visitors’ room and faced her father.

He was standing with his back to one of the unopened windows so that the little light that was in the room showed her nothing of his face or its expression. She saw only a tall, heavily built form, was conscious of a wave of desperate shyness which she was too young to attribute, to repulsion, and knew that she turned as though expecting comfort and sympathy from the Mother Superior.

But the door was shut, she had been pushed into this interview alone, it would seem, and being, by nature, essentially courageous, Pauline shook back her hair and turned to face her father.

She could not guess what fierce resentment her very attitude woke in the man. Because she was brave, because she was afraid yet rebellious, because her hair was red gold, her eyes gold brown, she woke such a swift memory of hate in Hardcastle that he could have struck her. Even so the wife whom he had so often hit at, yet never succeeded in breaking, had faced him with her bravery and her scorn, and hate had been intensified by thirteen years of brooding on revenge.

“You are damned like her,” he said, and moved a little sideways to the window so that Pauline could see now his sloping forehead, the grey hair so sleekly brushed, the big nose and thick lips half hidden by the drooping moustache.

Now it is almost true to say that Pauline had never known dislike towards a living thing in, her short life, so completely had the nuns enfolded her with love,, and with their doctrine of love. Only that this would not be quite true. All Sister Augustine’s gentlest teaching and Sister Veronica’s mild scorn had not been able to make Pauline feel gentle towards spiders. As a baby, as a child, she had shrieked with fear if one came near her; the shriek she had learnt to suppress, the shuddering fear remained. Standing there, with her back to the door, her small hands clenched on the handle, Pauline shuddered now. She was uncontrollably reminded of a spider, though she knew the idea to be quite ridiculous. And then she forced herself to speak.

“The Reverend Mother says you are my father,” she said. “I—I don’t remember you.”

“No,” Hardcastle agreed. He too made an effort to pull himself together. “I don’t suppose you do. You were about four when I saw you last. Nevertheless the Reverend Mother is correct. I have the honour to be your father.”

He sat down in a chair by the window, his long plump hands stroking his knees. Pauline was to learn that that was a very favourite action of his and always betokened a desire to hurt.

“Come over here,” he ordered. “Don’t they teach little girls in the convent to love their fathers?”

“They have never taught me anything about you,” said Pauline. “I suppose they thought you really wanted me to forget as you seemed to have forgotten me. No one has ever spoken to me of you—or of mother,” she flashed the word at him, it was as though some memory of past antagonism stirred in her. “Yet I think I remember mother,” she added on a softer key.

“Ah,” said Hardcastle, “so you remember your mother!”

There was such sarcasm in his voice that it stung Pauline to one of those little quick gusts of rage that had always so distressed Sister Augustine. She left her refuge by the door, came forward till her short skirts nearly brushed his knee, and with hands tightly clenched stared down at her father.

“You said just now I was damned like her,” she said. “I know you meant mother. I am glad, so glad and proud to be like mother. You don’t like her, I can hear that in your voice. I want to warn you that if you ever say anything against her, if you show me you don’t like me remembering her, I shall hate you. Hate you, even though you are my father, and Sister Augustine says we should not hate even spiders!”

“Ah,” said Hardcastle again. His eyes narrowed, his tongue caressed his lips. Then he put out his hands, strong for all their plumpness, and pulled her down on to his knees. “We’ll see about all that, my dear,” he said, “in the near future. Meanwhile a kiss is called for.”

And with every instinct in her shuddering away from the contact of his lips, with every nerve in her aching to shriek as the child Pippa had shrieked at a spider, Pauline felt his lips on her cheek and sat stiffened to a sudden knowledge of what hate might mean.

Chapter II

Hate’s Shadow

Lo, how the world grows dark about hate’s name;
And love grows pale, and hides her head for shame.

There are many ways in which a man may degrade himself, and there is something about the climate of Africa which seems to lend itself to the self-degradation of the white man, if he has an original trend that way. Perhaps the loneliness in a great many cases eats into a man’s soul; perhaps it is the lack of neighbourly supervision, for there is not much in the way of outspoken public opinion, and a white man must be forgiven many things by his fellow white men in a community where they are so immeasurably in the minority. Or it may be that there is something insatiably evil in the atmosphere of Africa that waits eagerly to bring about the fall of white civilization; a scarcely seen shadow that creeps behind all her beauty and that haunts the minds of men with half-formed thoughts of lust and cruelty and death. Whatever it may be it is certain that Africa does have an appalling effect on some natures, and Tom Hardcastle was of those who allowed the worst side of his nature to develop, free from all self-restraint because of outside restraint there was so little.

He had been in the country for twenty years. The thought of England had never appealed to him, he had never wanted to return to her after his first visit home. And he had done many things in Africa. He had hunted elephants; he had traded in ivory; he had owned plantations in many parts. And always he had deteriorated. In England he would have kept a dog for the sheer joy of kicking it, in Africa he could display this amiable attention towards black men. He could never have been moral in the sense of restraining desire lest it should hurt others or himself, but it is doubtful whether he could have developed the beast in him to the same extent in a civilized country as he was able to do during his twenty years’ existence in Africa. His wife, the first Pauline of red gold hair and frank eyes, could have told the world some stories of depravity and shame that would perhaps have shocked even the easy going morality of Africa, but the first Pauline had been very silent. She had run away, leaving her little daughter behind. She had hoped he would forget the child who had never meant anything to him; she had prayed that something might turn up for baby Pauline, that some one might take her and love her and hold her. All of which is no excuse for the first Pauline. It was base desertion, as Sister Augustine had said, and only God could judge, or comfort her, as the Mother Superior had added.

The Mother Superior on her first visit to Hardcastle after his return to Fort Portal tried very hard to keep her thoughts thus leniently balanced on the memory of Pauline’s mother. The woman must have had so much to bear, must have been through so much before she had brought her mind to the final idea of desertion. Sitting in the untidy, sparsely furnished drawing-room, Mother Magdalene felt that she understood some of the horror of antipathy that must have driven the first Pauline. For Mother Magdalene was strangely sensitive to atmosphere, and here, in this room, its windows shuttered against the sun, its air faintly impregnated with the odour of stale spirits, she was woefully conscious of evil. Her little Pauline, the Pippa of the nuns’ loving fancy, the child of life and laughter, to be transplanted to such an atmosphere, to be left to stand or fall alone on her own courage. Mother Magdalene found it a little difficult to think kindly for the moment of Pauline the first who had failed and run away.

And then the door from the dining-room opened and Mr. Hardcastle stood in front of her. He had discarded his coat, his shirt was open at the throat showing the puffed lines of cheek and chin, the coarse hairs that grew on his chest. Hardcastle had had what he was in the habit of calling “a thick night” the evening before; he was tired, and heavy and very irritable this morning. It is not likely that the sight of Mother Magdalene, sitting very upright on the edge of one of his chairs, her thin firm hands held close together under the sheltering sleeves of her long white habit, brought him any pleasure.

“Well,” he said brusquely, his blood-flecked eyes searched the room, “and where’s Pauline? I thought you were to bring her down to-day.”

Mother Magdalene swallowed something in her throat and stood up. There were faint lines of pain round her mouth and her eyes were misty. In seeing the man she had realized how useless was the mission she had come on. Pauline was not hers to give or keep, she would not be allowed any say in the matter. Yet she spoke her words firmly, her brave old eyes on his face.

“I came to see you first by myself, Mr. Hardcastle. I wanted to beg you to rescind your decision. Pauline is so young, she has been with us so long, we have loved her so dearly. In taking her from us you are removing her, at the most critical time in her life, from the influence of women. A girl needs that, Mr. Hardcastle. Leave her with us till she is a little older, a little stronger in faith and judgment. Believe me, you will never regret it.”

Hardcastle had moved from the door and thrown himself down in one of the long easy chairs. He was stroking his knees with his hands as Pauline had seen him do.

“For thirteen years,” he said, and there was a sneer in the words that brought a faint tinge of colour to Mother Magdalene’s cheeks, “I have been deprived of the influence of women, as you poetically put it, Reverend Mother. It is a little hard to ask me to give up the joy of having a grown-up daughter to run my house for me.”

“Pauline is scarce grown up,” Mother Magdalene answered him. “She is a child at heart. A very pure child, Mr. Hardcastle.”

He leant back laughing a little. “And I, you would have me realize, am hardly fit to have the company of a pure child. I must admit that that side of my daughter will probably bore me. But she does not look a fool; she will pick up worldly wisdom fast enough, and I dare say she is capable of ordering meals, isn’t she? Look here, Reverend Mother, for thirteen years I’ve wandered homeless, thanks to my dear wife. Now I’ve a mind to settle down here again and make a home for myself. I’ve sent away my manager, I’m taking over myself. What is your objection to my having my daughter to live with me? “

“If you take her you do a wicked thing,” said Mother Magdalene a little, breathlessly; she had never spoken quite so harshly to anyone before.

“Yours is not a house, in that you speak correctly, Mr. Hardcastle, into which you should bring a young girl. I am, God knows, slow to believe evil of anyone, but there are things one cannot help hearing, knowing.”

“Ferreting out, you mean,” said Hardcastle; he jerked himself upright. “Mission stations are famous for that. Well, Reverend Mother, slinging abuse at each other doesn’t get us much further, I suppose you do not propose to dispute my right to my daughter. I certainly intend to have her, whatever line you take up.”

“How should I fight?” said Mother Magdalene quietly. “What weapons can I use? You choose to do this thing. God and your own conscience must judge you.”

So Mother Magdalene put up her fight for Pauline and returned defeated. Sister Augustine waiting anxiously at the end of the convent road for her return took the news with a renewed sense of dislike towards Pauline the first.

“The child’s mother,” she said quickly. “Oh, I hope God has punished her for this. Our little Pippa! What can we do, Mother?”

“We can do nothing but pray,” said Mother Magdalene. “God will guard Pippa, where our care must fail.”

Yet despite prayers the thing brought vivid consternation to all their hearts. There had never been so great a shadow cast over their lives. They might strive to hide their dismay, but it was very visible to Pauline, and she threw herself tempestuously—as was ever her way—into the battle.

“I hate him, Reverend Mother, I shall always hate him.” She held to that firmly in the face of all Mother Magdalene’s gentle rebukes. “Why should I have to go and live with someone that I hate?”

“Hate is an evil passion, little Pippa,” Mother Magdalene answered. “It hurts the giver more than the receiver. If you learn to hate, much of the sunshine of God will go out of your heart.”

“Yet God asks us to hate evil,” argued Pauline, shrewd eyes on the well-known gentle face.

“It is not for us to say that anyone is evil, seeing as little as we do.”

“And I suppose Mother hated him too,” Pauline went on quite calmly. “That is why she left him. But why did she leave me, Reverend Mother? You have never told me about Mother, and of course I don’t remember a thing though I like to pretend I do. Why did she go away and leave me?”

There were so many things she did not know, so much that must be told her in the two days left to them of guardianship. Mother Magdalene shut her eyes for a second and prayed for guidance. It were better that love should open Pauline’s eyes, than that she should learn bitterly, through experience.

“I knew your mother so very little,” she answered

gently. “She and your father had only been here about six months. Once I met her, she came up to see us. She was very like you, Pauline, except that she was so much sadder, a little bitter because she had been hurt. And then one night your father brought you to us, and we learnt that your mother had left him. I think she knew people would be kind to you, Pauline. You were a dear little baby, though very wilful, Sister Augustine said.”

“I wonder if she hated me too,” said Pauline, “else why didn’t she take me with her when she went? Not that I am sorry to have been left with you. You’ve been dears to me, I love you all. And I won’t go away, I won’t, I won’t. Reverend Mother, he made me think of spiders the first time I saw him.”

“Ah, little Pauline, hush, hush,” begged Mother Magdalene. She took the eager, hot head in her two hands. “Keep always your faith in God, Pauline—we have tried to teach you that—and love, Pauline, it is the most saving grace in the world. Give out love and love will come back to you. And God keep you, little Pauline, always within the shadow of His wings.”

It was all quite perturbing enough to have distressed a steadier heart than Pauline’s. The nuns’ tears, their silent consternation, Mother Superior’s whispered, broken warnings and advice. It was no wonder that Pauline stood on the threshold of her new life shaken and perplexed. Yet she had courage, a certain gay confidence. She was still the Pippa of Sister Augustine’s fancy.

“God’s in His Heaven—
All’s right with the world!”

If she had had a banner she would have blazoned those words on it. As it was she went into the battle with only her brave laughter to help her.

Hardcastle was not in the house when Pauline and Sister Augustine, who had been deputed to do the handing over, arrived. A house that Hardcastle had built those fourteen years ago when his sluggish veins still held some energy. Indeed, it stood to testify to the ability the man had once possessed, for it was splendidly built out of the rough materials to hand, and had withstood the storms and onslaughts of white ants in a wonderful fashion. Pauline and Sister Augustine were at liberty to walk all over it, this home that was to be Pauline’s in the future; to stand on the wide shaded veranda and look over the tangled garden ablaze with flowers and trees. For once someone who had lived in the house had loved the garden, and though it had run riot since then, there were still traces of wild beauty. Great-headed roses, mauve and pink and blue lupins scenting the air.

“I don’t like the house,”stated Pauline quite definitely. “It smells stale. But I think I shall love the garden, Sister Augustine, don’t you?”

“Yes, it has beauty,” agreed little Sister Augustine. The house had made her shiver. She tried to shut her eyes to the vision of Pauline living there.

The servants were grouped together at the end of the veranda, watching their Bwana’s daughter. They probably knew more than anyone else what might be in store for the white girl, yet there was no trace of any emotion save sleek curiosity on their faces. An African native is very indifferent to the sufferings of others. A woman pushed her way out from among them and crossed over to the two white people, kneeling in front of Pauline, lifting bold yet sly eyes to the white girl’s face. She was a big, handsome woman, with glossy black shoulders and teeth that shone white between thick black lips.

“Greetings, little Mukyala,” she said. “Have you come to reign in my place?”

And it was Sister Augustine who answered, pushing herself between the kneeling figure and Pauline, her wide white coif hiding the black face from Pauline’s eyes.

“Go,” she said quickly. “Is it for such as you to talk to a white child?”

All of which Pauline understood, for she spoke the native language quite as well as any of the nuns. Yet something held her silent, a loyal desire not to add to Sister Augustine’s perturbation, which was so visible on the flushed face, in the trembling hands.

When they stood later at the bottom of the garden under the shade of some huge spreading tree, to say good-bye, it was the nun who clung to Pauline, folding the slim young figure in her arms as though she would fain protect the child from all the dangers of the world.

“Remember, little one, we are always here. If there are things you do not understand, things that hurt or frighten you, come to us. There is much evil in the world, Pauline, but there is always good: If you seem to lose touch with the good, Pauline, come back to us, let us help you to try and find it again.”

“Of course I will,” said Pauline very philosophically. “I will come every week to Mass, Sister Augustine. And I don’t think I shall grow bad, at least not badder than I have been.”

Pauline went back slowly to the house after she had seen Sister Augustine’s figure disappear over the bend of the hill that led to the mission. She was feeling, as was only natural, a little depressed, a little overawed by the nun’s evident fear and horror. To be bad, as she had said, did not appeal to her, that was because she instinctively associated vice with ugliness. She shunned evil as naturally as she shunned spiders, and her father’s house, so she put it figuratively to herself, must be full of spiders. But the garden at least was beautiful,

Pauline waited in her walk to look round her. The gay-coloured lupins nodded, and waved to her from among a tangle of green; violets grew as fragrantly as they grew at the mission, right up to the mossy roots of a giant tree. And then, a little tinkling sound broke the stillness, a few shrill monotonous notes drawn from a tightly stretched cord across a parchment drum. Pauline recognized the sound. There must be a solitary musician sitting somewhere behind the tree, playing on a native fiddle.

Pauline decided to investigate, muffling her footsteps on the violets. If a beautiful day tempts you to make music, even if it is only the monotonous scraping of a native fiddle, your soul must have something in common with the birds.

Round the other side of the tree a boy sat, or rather crouched, huddled over the instrument he held in his hands. A native boy, Pauline surmised, since he was quite naked save for the small linen drawers that clothed his nether limbs. But, if he were native, he was of a caste and colour Pauline had never seen before. Tawny skinned, he showed, with a faint glow of red under his skin, and his hair, though fuzzy, did not grow in the customary tight curls and was of an unexpected rusty brown colour.

Pauline stood amazed, a little startled at the boy’s appearance, a little bewildered at her own feelings. For the figure attracted, yet repulsed her; the monotonous wailing notes of the fiddle acted in some strange way on her nerves. She felt stirred by half understood instincts, guessed at desires. And even as she stood swaying a little almost as though her body kept unwilling time to the curious melody, the boy looked up and broke off his music on a sharp twanging note.

He sprang to his feet; he was as tall as Pauline, she could see now, and very finely made, lithe, with delicate muscles that showed under the shining skin. His great brown eyes stared at Pauline; his face, a curious face of pouting lips and slanting lines, displayed first fear, then curiosity, and lastly a not altogether pleasant, sly humour. Whereupon the strange being chuckled, and holding his native fiddle clasped against his neck, danced a few grotesque steps away from her and began to play again.

Pauline shook herself; she was annoyed because of her fear and intrigued because of her curiosity.

“Who are you?” she asked in the native tongue. “What are you doing there?”

He might have been going to answer her with truth or impudence, but at the moment his eyes caught sight of someone behind Pauline’s back, and she saw such fear sweep over his expressive face, shiver across his being, that she was herself almost shaken with it. What could this wild creature—for she seemed at that moment to realize that the boy was scarcely human—have seen to so frighten him? He at least did not wait for his terror to materialize more fully; with a little half-choked sound he turned and dived into the bushes, and Pauline heard her father’s voice speaking behind her.

“Queer animal, eh?” Hardcastle’s tone jeered at her fear, made her stiffen herself to deny it. “He has a great dislike to a white face. His abrupt departure makes an introduction impossible, but you’ve seen Satan, Pauline. I hope you’ll learn to tame him in time.”

But in one particular at least Pauline knew that her father had lied, for that wild look of fear had leapt to life in the boy’s face when he had caught sight of Hardcastle; Pauline, in herself, had not called it into being.

Chapter III

Mrs. Thomas Intervenes

Long ages ago, in the garden of Eve,
A woman was fashioned for man, I believe.
Born out of the need of his heart at strife
For someone to share the glory of life.
And love grew around them and ran like a flame,
’Twixt this man and this woman, by God made the same!

“Of course we should do something for the girl,” agreed Mrs. Gallard, “but the thing is, what? Our friend Hardcastle is rather impossible, isn’t he?”

She stretched out dainty fingers and flicked the ash from her cigarette into an ash-tray placed conveniently near. Everything about Mrs. Gallard was dainty. Her companion, watching her with envious, if slightly disapproving eyes, was often driven to think that there was nothing whatsoever in Mrs. Gallard except daintiness. She gave the impression of having no inner life, no capacity for love or sorrow, no real desire for anything but daintiness. To the fulfilling of this desire, however, she must have brought both brains and nimble fingers. For it was wonderful how she created the atmosphere round her; turned her rather dull exteriored Government house into a realm where daintiness reigned. Much real hard work must have lain behind the fashioning of her drawing-room, the well chosen, correctly hung curtains, the daintily covered cushions, the chintzes that covered and concealed all ugly lines in the furniture, the carefully selected flowers that blended their beauty into the rest of the colour scheme. It was all so wonderful when one remembered the materials on which she must perforce have had to work; somehow or other, Mrs. Gallard succeeded in imparting daintiness even to her staff of domestics. Her boys were always so clean looking, so quiet, so respectful. And then, to crown everything else, there was herself. A small, perfectly made woman, wonderfully dressed, never untidy, unfailingly coiffured, manicured, exquisite, whether she had just come off a safari, or had finished playing a set of tennis.

“It is wonderful,” Mildred Thomas had once said, “but it can only mean that she puts her whole soul into looking nice. And you know, Dick, that is not really all souls were made for.”

Mildred Thomas, Mrs. Gallard’s present companion, was so different in every possible way. She lived in the small house apportioned off for the use of the police officer, and it was always gloriously untidy outside and in. Her veranda was littered with old wooden boxes of all sizes and shapes, in which Mildred grew innumerable seeds that she invariably forgot to transplant, and three dogs, two cats and one baby occupied the interior, infinitely to the detriment of its orderliness.

Mrs. Gallard would shiver quite noticeably on the mornings when she ran across to see Mrs. Thomas, instead of Mrs. Thomas coming to see her. Until the arrival of Pauline, they had been the only two white women in the station, and, different as they were, they relied a great deal on each other’s companionship. But it was quite incomprehensible to Mrs. Gallard why baby Dick, called Twinkie so that his name should not clash with his father’s, must be allowed to turn a drawing-room into a bear garden, and if it was expedient for a baby to wear such hideous garments as those made out of turkish towelling, could it be absolutely necessary to have them hanging on the front veranda to dry? And dogs, Mrs. Gallard felt, should never be allowed indoors. When Mildred came to see her she always had to say quite firmly, “Dear, do ask your boy to take the dogs home.”

To Mildred, of course, baby Dick was the most important thing in existence, and if the sun chose to shine on the front veranda in the mornings and not on the back, she would have hung baby Dick’s napkins there even if the King had been coming to visit her, As for the dogs, well the truth was that Mildred never noticed mud on the carpet, or white hairs spattered over her cushions. Never even noticed that her pictures were all hanging crooked, or that the arrangement of brilliant red dahlias against purple curtains was rather trying to the eye. Only sometimes Mrs. Gallard, on one of her rare visits—for, taking baby Dick and the dogs into account, Mrs. Gallard really preferred Mrs. Thomas to do the visiting—would indicate, oh ever so daintily, that things were not arranged or managed as well as they might possibly be. And then that day at lunch Mildred would look up, her face a little flushed, her hair tousled, at big Dick, where he sat very large, very good natured, infinitely patient, plodding through a rather indifferent meal provided for him by a careless wife and a very bad cook.

And, “Dick Darling,” Mildred would say, “am I a perfectly awful wife and housekeeper? Would you like to change me?”

“Not on your life,” Dick would answer with all solemnity; it was rather delightful the way he worshipped her despite her carelessness, her untidiness.

“Give us some more pudding, old girl, and don’t talk rot.”

Now Mr. Gallard, thin and upright and nearly as immaculate as his wife, did not worship Mrs. Gallard. He admired her immensely, but sometimes when he looked at her there was real weariness in his eyes. Which was very strange when one considered how well she ran his house for him, how perfectly everything was managed.

They had never had any children, and babies were not things that Mrs. Gallard ever spoke of or seemed to include in her scheme of existence. Mr. Gallard never spoke of anything personal to anyone. He was quite the most silent man in the Protectorate, everyone said. The two women sat this morning in Mrs. Gallard’s drawing-room, Mildred having rushed across, as usual hotly eager on a deed of kindness.

“That girl, she is only a child, Mother Magdalene tells me, alone in the house with that horror. He is a horror, you know. Oh, I am quite aware we shouldn’t say so. Dick is always warning me not to say exactly what I think about people; but, Nanette, you do agree with me, don’t you?”

For ten months in the station; together had brought these two to the familiarity of Christian names, though in spirit they stood as far apart as the poles.

Of course, Nanette agreed, but she was not the person ever to take up a battle on moral grounds. To her mind Hardcastle was an unpleasant person because of his physical appearance; as the only wealthy planter in the district he was someone who must be placated and kept on friendly terms for the sake of Mrs. Gallard’s personal comfort.

“What can we do?” she repeated now. “The girl is his daughter. Of course, we’ll call and ask her to come in and spend the week-end with us. And, being his daughter, my dear, she’ll probably be able to put up with him better than we do. After all,” she straightened herself and patted the cushion she had been leaning against into correct shape, “we know nothing definite against Mr. Hardcastle. He drinks sometimes; well, so do most men. He keeps a black woman; that is another quite common failing out here, isn’t it?”

She shot a glance at Mildred and laughed at the other’s hot wave of colour.

“My dear,” she went on delicately. “All men are alike. Black or white, it really makes very little difference to them.

‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart’;

that merely means that he can indulge it in all sorts of directions which to us seem disgusting.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Mildred. “It makes me feel hot all over to hear you talking like that. Big Dick and baby Dick, I know it could never be true of them.”

Mrs. Gallard smiled and lit another cigarette. “Well, big Dick and little Dick out of the question,” she went on, “it is at least so common a practice that we cannot hold it up as a peculiar vice against Mr. Hardcastle.”

“Oh, it’s not that anyway,” Mildred interrupted impetuously. “The man’s a horror, you know that yourself, though you aren’t going to admit it. I feel quite sick to think of a girl being in his clutches.”

“You talk rather dramatically, dear,” said Mrs. Gallard. “However, I do more or less agree with you. But marriage is the only way the girl can escape. How about marrying her to our new A.D.C.?”

“If only we could,” agreed Mildred. She stood up, pulling her terai hat primly over her ruffled hair. She was at heart an inveterate match-maker, a great and sentimental believer in love. Marriage had brought her such radiant happiness that she was eager to see others enter into it. “I think I’ll send Dick out and make him fetch her in for the week-end,” she said. “We’ve got Sterne dining with us to-night.”

“Yes, do, dear, and I’ll ask her to tea to-morrow, also to meet young Sterne,” said Mrs. Gallard in a spasm of generosity. “But go carefully with the young people, Mildred. Don’t rush in where angels fear to tread.”

So that was how it was that Robin Sterne first met Pauline. In the Thomases’ drawing-room, its untidiness softened to a delightful air of friendly comfort by the aid of its one big lamp, shaded by a pink shade. The lamp was the only really nice thing in Mrs. Thomas’s drawing-room, at least so Mrs. Gallard said. It had been a wedding present and Mildred had had nothing to do with the choosing of its shape and colour. It stood by itself on a pedestal in the corner of the room, and Pauline, when Robin first saw her, was sitting just under its light, her red gold hair—she had cut it short just lately—fluffed out in little curls round her face. She looked young, ridiculously young, and, for some reason, oddly pathetic. For one could see that her face had been formed for laughter, her eyes for gay defiance of the world, and, in some way or other, to-night all her beauty, her youthful joy, seemed blurred, marred by some shadow. She looked, Robin thought, in the quick upward glance of her eyes, in the nervous tension of her hands, as though she had just come through some great moment of fear, and he felt his heart rise in hot indignation at the thought.

It was one of this young man’s characteristics, swift anger at wrong done to weak things. For the rest he was an ordinary enough specimen of English boyhood; straight standing, broad shouldered, clean handed. He had very frank eyes that wavered between blue and grey, a clear-cut mouth and slightly thrust out chin which denoted a certain pugnaciousness and made him quick to fight once his anger was roused.

And he was not very tall, just over-topping Pauline by half a head, and standing only shoulder high beside the immense proportions of Dick Thomas.

“You two are the only young, unattached people in Fort Portal,” said Mildred eagerly, anxiously, the introduction having been effected. “You’ve got to be great friends.”

Rushing in, as Mrs. Gallard would have said; and Robin stared at Pauline, the hot anger at the back of his mind because he felt that something or someone had been frightening her, and Pauline turned her head away and felt the red blood sting her face, because he looked at her with a man’s eyes and she thought, she had learnt to hate all men.

Indeed Pauline had learnt a great many things during the last three months, for it was three months since Sister Augustine had brought her down to her father’s house, and, of them all, perhaps fear was the greatest. Behind her childish dislike of spiders there had always been terror, and now behind and beyond everything, she was conscious of fear of her father.

He had never hurt her physically; indeed, in some of his drunken moods he would wax most affectionate, and it was then that she feared him most. When he would loll back in his chair, his plump hands caressing his knees, talking to her in his soft thick voice, watching her with eyes behind which lurked, she was always so certain, vindictive dislike. And, though he had never ill-treated her, she had seen him so wickedly cruel elsewhere. She knew now why that look of absolute terror had flashed across the half-caste boy’s face. Once, up at the mission, she had rescued a bird from a cat and held it in her hands while it fluttered and gasped out its life. Satan made her think of that bird; she would, in the impetuosity of her youth, have given her life to protect him, and she could do so little. The big house, with its many empty rooms, its silent discomfort, had grown woefully repugnant to her. She was only happy in the garden; in the garden she could get back, just ever so little, to her faith in good, to the teachings of the gentle nuns. But even there she would often stumble upon Satan, his face strained with terror and pain, crouching among the bushes, nursing his poor tortured limbs back to movement. Once, in one of the deserted rooms of the house, she had found him stretched on the floor, his hands tied to the legs of the bed, his feet to the legs of the table, and all the skin on his bronze back cut and flayed by a most cruel flogging. She had felt physically sick at the sight, standing shaking in the doorway trying to shut her eyes. And then—oh, she was still courageous, Pauline—she had run forward and knelt beside him and loosed the cords and chafed his limbs, and wept to hear him groan and see the eyelids flutter on his face. He had never been afraid of her since that day; he would run to show her the marks of the blows; he would play his fiddle for her crouched among the violets, or bring her gaudy coloured butterflies held with extraordinary care in his slim fingers. But he always frowned if she let them go again into the sunshine. Behind his gentleness, his terror, he was by instinct cruel. He delighted to kill, to hurt to maim. It was that side of his nature that kept Pauline from quite loving him. Yet, in his quieter moments she would realize that he was cruel as a cat is cruel, that, his whole nature was built on animal, elfin lines.

Just before she had come in on this visit to Mrs. Thomas, Hardcastle had spoken to Pauline about Satan.

“Won’t do to make a pet of him,” he had said. “I’ve seen you, my young lady. But that lad gets whipped for his good. He’s all wild beast. Can’t afford to forget that.”

“And you?” Pauline had asked, the courage flaming in her face. “What sort of a beast are you to treat him as you do? If you are afraid of him, wouldn’t it be better to kill him—no one here seems to mind what you do—or, or send him away?”

“That isn’t the way to talk to your father, Pauline,” Hardcastle had jeered, his hands stroking his knees. “You’ll have to taste the whip yourself if you are not careful.”

“I would like you to beat me instead,” said Pauline, though her whole soul shivered and drew back. “I am stronger than Satan is.”

“Well, when I think you are strong enough, I’ll break you all right, my girl,” laughed Hardcastle. “You’ll take your medicine in the same way as he does, if you aren’t careful.”

With sick fear shaking the brave intention of her mind, Pauline had changed the subject.

“Has Satan always been with you,” she had asked, “ever since he was a tiny baby? “

“Always,” Hardcastle nodded. “I found him when he was three. His mother knifed herself before my eyes. Satan has been a mild form of relaxation to me ever since.”

Relaxation! Pauline knew what that must mean. She crept away out on to the veranda and with her white face and bitten lips ran right into Dick Thomas’s burly figure just dismounting from his motor-bike.

“I tell you,” Dick had said later to his wife; “if I meet Hardcastle many more times, I shall give him a damned good thrashing; I shan’t be able to prevent myself.”

Which oracular remark, the only one he could be brought to make on the subject, led Mrs. Thomas to believe that her feelings of pity for Pauline were really more than justified.

She was very gentle with the girl, very full of chatter and laughter, so as to make her feel quite at home. Baby Dick was brought much into evidence; Mrs. Thomas felt that the hurt which baby Dick’s hands could not soothe must be very bad indeed. But to all her kindness, to baby Dick’s funniest antics, Pauline remained sadly apathetic. She was not to be drawn out of her shell of reserve, Mrs Thomas realized. Indeed, it was something more than reserve that clothed Pauline round. Her mind and heart had been violated by the experiences of the last three months, and from the warm comfort of Mrs. Thomas’s desire to help she looked back as it were and saw only Satan’s face, his poor wild eyes that cried, for pity and love.

The dinner party was not the success that Mrs. Thomas had planned it should be.

“Do you think he liked her, Dick?” she asked, as later on she lay wide-eyed beside her husband in their small bedroom with baby Dick’s cot taking up most of the wall space. “I saw him look at her once or twice.”

“A cat may look at a king or a queen,” was Dick’s somewhat sleepy reply. “Do you expect Sterne to fall in love to order, old lady?”

“Oh, well, if you are going to fall in love, you generally do it at first sight,” argued Mildred. “I thought she looked lovely, and so tragic somehow. And he’s strong and kind. I am sure he is awfully kind.”

“As a matter of fact——”

Dick answered her first question, as was often his habit. He said he found that the only way ever to get any answers in; if he waited and listened to the end of her sentences he got so bewildered that answering was impossible.

“——when I first met you I was in love with someone else, and I thought it rather a bore being introduced to you.”

“Oh, Dick,” remonstrated Mildred; she sat up on her elbow in bed to peer at her offending spouse. “What was she like? Like Mrs, Gallard? Anyway,” she sank back with a little sigh, “I know I made up my mind right away. I just said to myself, ‘Oh, I do hope he’ll fall in love with me.’ I suppose that might be called falling in love myself, mightn’t it?”

“It might,” agreed Dick. “I always did suspect you of having rather rushed me.”

“Dick, you are perfectly horrid. Go to sleep and leave me to make my own plans. I don’t see why Mr. Sterne shouldn’t fall in love with her. There is no one else up here, anyway.”

So Mrs. Thomas lay and plotted till she dropped finally asleep to dream placidly of baby Dick; and Pauline lay in bed in the small spare room of the Thomases’ house and held sleep at bay, because of late she had grown to dread the tricks her imagination played her. Had Mrs. Thomas been able to see into Pauline’s thoughts she would have been disappointed. For they were not concerned at all with the young man who had sat opposite her at dinner and watched her with such frank, friendly eyes. Pauline was not in a mood for young men or dreaming about love; the ugliness of life had come too close to her of late, she could not shake its shadow from her mind.

As to young Sterne, well there Mrs. Thomas might have got more satisfaction. Undoubtedly he did think of Pauline just for that very brief space before sleep came to claim a healthy young mind. And all night he dreamt of her. Not in any sense lover-like dreams, but clouded with danger and strange happenings, with some wild dark forest as the background, and with that look of fear in her eyes spurring him on to mighty deeds,

So, who can tell? Perhaps even in such soil the seed of love took root and threw out those delicate tendrils that grow in time to hold a man’s heart in great unbreakable strands.

Pauline went up to see her nuns the next day. In three months she had seen very little of them. They were people whose lives were bound and held down by rules and work to be done. They could not go very often to Pauline, she had not gone to them. She had dreaded their soft anxious sympathy, their eyes which asked questions which they could not bring their lips to say, “Come to us, if you lose touch with good,” Sister Augustine had said. “Let us help you to find it again.” Pauline only knew one thing, she must never let them guess at the evil which surrounded her and held her down. It seemed, in some sort of way, to be treachery against their teaching, against their faith. Her own brave motto was so dim in her heart these days: “God’s in His heaven”; that was perhaps true,but the rest had failed her. Let her hide from them at all costs how far her faith in the goodness of God had wavered.

Her visit this afternoon taxed her powers of pretence to their uttermost limit. Sister Augustine, down in the orchard among her hens and rabbits! Pauline wanted to run and fling herself against that wide-skirted figure; she wanted to cry out her terror and cling to those hands that had never denied her protection. Mother Magdalene, sitting so still and quiet, the rosary slipping between her fingers. Pauline wanted to kneel there, and feel those hands about her hair while she sobbed out her agony of heartbreak about Satan. But in the chapel, where they took her in order that they might all kneel and pray together as they had often done, she wanted to stand and shout out her defiance at the altar where she had been taught to worship. God was nowhere, nowhere! Nothing was right with the world.

Pauline did none of these things. She laughed at and with Sister Augustine over the rabbits and the fowls; she sat and talked as if nothing were the matter to Mother Magdalene; she knelt very stiffly erect in the little chapel—and knew that her lips moved in semblance of the prayers that the others said. Then she said good-bye, kissing them all and promising to come again before she went back to her father.

“She is changed, our little Pippa,” Mother Magdalene whispered. “The laughter is on her lips but not in her heart.”

“She is unhappy,” said Sister Augustine with, more bitterness. “She hides it from us, but it is there all the same.”

Pauline walked down the long tree-bordered road that led from the mission to the hill on which the station was built. It was still quite early; for she had come up before tea and the nuns had insisted that she walk back before there was any chance of the sun setting. To-day the world was wonderfully beautiful, the great mountains showing clear cut against a sky of hazy blue. And a little restless wind was abroad; it ruffled all the leaves of the banana groves, tossing their great green fans upwards and sidewards; it scattered little soft white clouds about the sky, and sang among the tall grass that lined the roadway. Pauline walked quickly, holding her head very high. At the bend of the road she turned to wave good-bye to the nuns. There they all stood, Sister Augustine a little apart from the others. It had not been very easy to deceive Sister Augustine, she had certainly guessed that something was amiss.

Tears stung in Pauline’s eyes, a most rebellious sob struggled in her throat; she turned and walked quickly, seeing nothing, down the road. And then, since the world now seemed so empty, nothing astir on the road save the little laughing wind, and her own heart so woefully sad, Pauline gave up the pretence, and sitting down at the edge of the yard under the shade of a very large banana tree buried her head in her arms and cried her fill.

Mrs. Thomas had sent a note round to Sterne after tea. “Miss Hardcastle has walked up to the mission,” she wrote. “Couldn’t you run up and fetch her on your bike? It seems a dreadful way for her to come back by herself?”

“Of course; what time?” he answered, and made Mrs. Thomas’s eyes sparkle by coming round himself and finding out whether he could start at once.

So to Pauline, weeping in her imagined solitude, came the harsh sound of a motor-bike, and she had hardly time to rub her eyes fiercely and sit farther back in the shade, hoping that the intruder would dash past, when Sterne was upon her. The glint of her white skirt caught his eyes, and he pulled up just beside her. To Sterne, this evening the world really did seem a thing of beauty, the wind a delightful force that warmed his blood and stirred his senses. He sprang off his bike and laughed at the girl’s figure under the trees. She was part of the beauty, a part of the stir that thrilled him.

“By jove,” he said. “I am glad I came. You must be tired.”

And then he saw that she had been crying, and a horrible stiffness descended on him.

“By jove,” was all he could find to say again. She had rubbed her eyes, but the tears were still there, the sob of them stayed in her throat.

“Oh, go away,” begged Pauline. “I want to cry. Why should you stop me crying?”

And with that and the most forlorn little sound Sterne thought he had ever heard, she threw herself sideways and lay with her face against her arms, her whole body pressed along the warm, brown earth.

Chapter IV

“Love Comes and Goes”

Dreams of a golden love,
Butterflies light as air;
Softly they touch on her lips and eyes,
Showing her beauty fair.

How does love come? There are a great many arguments about that, and people will tell you differently. “For us, it wakened out of friendship,” say some, and

“I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.”

sing the words of an old song. Which is true love? How can we answer, we little people whose life is bounded by a dream? But, so common-place are our days, so drab the realities of life, that it is no wonder that the most serious-minded of us envy rather wistfully the singer of that song

“I did but see her passing by,
And yet I love her till I die.”

For love that grows out of friendship may have about it that placid peace of well established things, but it is the bright glow of romance that our hearts are a-hungered for, and romance is born out of the swift coming of love’s wings.

Sterne loved Pauline in that moment as she lay her length along the ground, crying as any child might cry. Loved her in the hot leap of his pulses, in the quick desire that took and shook his being and made him long to gather her soft young body to his heart.

These things he forgot afterwards when common sense had time to reassert itself. For Robin Sterne was a very sensible young man and was apt to smile rather scornfully at the thought of love at first sight. He had his own very well balanced ideas about love. He wanted, for, one thing, to be quite sure that the object of his devotion should be worthy of him. He planned friendship as a forerunner of love, a similarity of thoughts, a definite basis of knowledge on which to build up trust.

And after all these things had been established love should come; love, which should resemble pal-ship more than anything else.

He was a little shaken, a little amazed, as he stood there with the breath of love’s wings about him, staring at Pauline. Afterwards, when he had had time to bring calm thought to bear on the subject, he decided that it was because he did not like to see a woman cry that he had been so stirred, but just for that moment his heart would have had him believe a quite different knowledge.

He moved at last and sat down near her, and because it was love and not merely pity that stirred within him, he did not dare touch her, but had to stay with his hands tight clenched to still their longing.

“I say,” he ventured, his words stiff and stupid. “Don’t cry like that, Miss Hardcastle, What can I do? What has happened? Shall I fetch Mrs. Thomas up to you?”

His words threw the cloak of self-restraint about Pauline again. She sat up, her face all flushed and wet, the lashes damp above her eyes.

“Don’t be silly,” she answered crossly without a doubt. “Can’t you see I really wanted to be left alone?”

“Well, I couldn’t very well leave you like this,” Robin answered. The red gold of her hair was perilously near his cheek; he felt ridiculously elated. “You know, I’ve never seen a girl really cry before. It’s—very upsetting.”

“It’s very owlish,” sniffed Pauline, and sat limp and dejected, the tears finished, her hands quiet on her lap.

How those hands seemed to call to Robin’s hands. His imagination leapt to the thought of putting his arms around her and drawing her against him. If he did that, her red gold hair would brush his lips. He had to pull imagination up on a sharp run.

“Have my handkerchief,” he substituted; “it’s yards bigger than yours, and it’s clean. Yours is soaking.”

Pauline took the proffered, handkerchief and rubbed her face. A stupid little remnant of a sob shook her as she did so, and Robin was terrified lest she should cry again.

“I want a wash,” said Pauline from behind the shelter of the handkerchief. “My face will look awful till I wash it.”

“We might go back to my place,” suggested Sterne, “or stop at the river. I tell you what, let’s go home the long way round, and then we can stop at the ford; there is no one ever about there, and you can bathe your face, I mean, in the bubbling stream. It sounds quite romantic, doesn’t it?”

Pauline looked up at him. Her eyes behind the shadow of her tears were rebellious.

“You are laughing at me,” she said. “You think I am an awful idiot for howling like that.”

“I don’t,” said Robin hotly, eagerly. “I think——”

Unaccountably his thought stammered; he stared at her, his face suddenly red.

Pauline looked back at him, brown eyes at blue, with the flutter of love’s wings between them! Then hers fell away quickly and she stood up, shaking out her skirt.

“It won’t take long to go round, will it?” she asked, “Mrs. Thomas will wonder what on earth I am doing, but I’d hate her to see me like this. And I promised to be home in time for baby’s bath.”

“Oh, we’ll do that all right,” he promised, and rose and stood beside her. “Ever ridden at the back of a motor-bike before, Miss Hardcastle? You’ve got to hold very tight.”

“Is it you I hold?” asked Pauline, and their eyes meeting again they both laughed, thus winning back to common sense and security.

They went, anyway, the long way home, and the wind danced against their faces and the hills at their back grew solemn and vast and mist laden with the sun sinking like a great ball of fire behind their heights. At the ford, a place where the rough road dipped suddenly to the level of a little planked bridge scarcely two feet above the running water of the river, Robin pulled up, and Pauline, laughing now at the secrecy which lay between them, jumped off and ran down to the stream and stooped to the waters; splashing them about her warm cheeks, her shining eyes. And then she stood up and shook back her hair and dried her face and hands on his handkerchief.

“Do I look all right?” she asked him, and in the same breath, “I’ve made your handkerchief awfully wet. It is as bad as mine now. I wonder where mine is?”

“I don’t mind mine being wet with river water,” said Robin, “so long as you don’t cry again.”

A moment of seriousness came to him as she stood close to him again, ready to jump on at the back.

“Won’t you tell me what it was?” he asked shyly. “Let me help. I can’t bear to think of you having to cry like that.”

Pauline flushed quickly, an odd look of defiance hardening her mouth; “No one could help me,” she said. “It was just silliness. Please Mr. Sterne, do try and forget it.”

Mrs. Thomas, it may be noted, was addicted to rushing in where angels fear to tread. She was very insistent that Robin should stop to supper that evening, and before supper she found occasion to catch him alone on the veranda and confided to him that she thought he had succeeded in rousing the dear girl from a wretched mood of sadness.

“She has been so depressed,” said Mrs. Thomas. “I felt worried about her. She is only a girl, she should be having such a good time and being so jolly.”

“Why doesn’t she?” asked Robin. He felt interested, yet in a way stiffened, as though common sense were already plucking at his sleeve bidding him beware.

Mrs. Thomas lowered her voice. “You don’t know Mr. Hardcastle, do you?” she asked. “He is a man we all dislike, even Dick, and Dick is very easygoing, Mr. Sterne. Sometimes I wonder whether her father ill treats Pauline; he has a dreadful reputation among the natives. Anyway, she is not happy with him, anyone with half an eye can see that.”

All working in a good cause but perhaps not very tactfully, leaving Robin feeling strangely on the defensive, as if on all sides his stronghold of common sense was being assailed.

And with Pauline, too, she blundered, staying to watch the girl slip out of her frock, watching the soft curls being brushed back and tied down.

“You’ve got such lovely hair,” murmured Mrs. Thomas. It was not exactly that she paid compliments, but she was always on tiptoe to admire if she liked anyone. “You are a very lucky girl, really; you’ve got such a lot about you that is pretty. Your hair, your eyes, your nose! Do you like Mr. Sterne? Do you know I am so awfully anxious you and he should fall in love with each other. A marriage up here would be lovely.”

She really saw it all in anticipation. The little stiff mission church decorated with white flowers, her own house the bower from which the bride went forth arrayed in gleaming satin and soft lace.

“I am afraid we are not in the least likely to,” said Pauline prosaically, and she, too, felt the sudden stiffening of which Robin had been conscious. That she had thrown herself so entirely on his chivalry as she had done that afternoon hurt her pride.

So that, despite all Mrs. Thomas’s planning and Mrs. Gallard’s half-amused assistance, the affair did not prosper at all. Pauline went back to the Hardcastle estate not much the happier for her brief interlude, and Robin Sterne was left with nothing but a very crumpled handkerchief that he kept, he did not quite know why, in his money box. A very crumpled pocket handkerchief and the perplexed memory of a passing thought. Not very much on which to build the substance of love’s throne.

Pauline found things in a state of tumult at Scora, the Hardcastle estate. Its owner had just decided to go on trek into the Congo in search of elephants and ivory. Periodically, these waves of unrest shook him out of whatever sphere of existence he had settled down into. For a brief moment Pauline hoped wildly that he might decide to leave her behind, and she even planned to try and ask him if she might not keep Satan as a companion. But her hopes were soon dissipated. Obviously, Hardcastle intended to take his family with him, for. companionship, or relaxation! Pauline, with a little shiver, wondered which it would be.

He told her his plans that evening, lolling back in his long chair, his plump hands fondling his knees.

“We start on.Saturday,” he said. “A sixteen-mile march the first day, twenty the next, and then, thank God, we are over the Semiliki and into a country where the Government isn’t so blessed ‘pi,’ and doesn’t always want to know how you are treating your black swine. Ever been on safari, done any marching before; Pauline?”

“I used to go out with the nuns,” Pauline admitted, and he laughed.

“Visiting the heathen, eh? Well, this will prove a tougher experience. I am going to harden you, Pauline; teach you not to wince when Satan howls.” He stretched himself. “Benson was in here while you were away.” he added. “Showed me some tusks that fairly made my mouth water. There are stores of ivory hidden in the forest, buried. Would you believe it? The niggers are cute enough for that.”

She could bear him better when he spoke like that of the wild, interests that drew him. A little of the spirit of splendid adventure came to her, listening to his hunting stories, his tales of that great mysterious forest that rings the far foot of the mountains. Later she found Satan hidden down in the garden, and tried to infect him with some of her new-found enthusiasm. But Satan was dumbly depressed, weighed down it was evident with some sense of disaster.

They started in two days’ time. A long column of shouting, singing porters, with Hardcastle in their midst being, carried shoulder high in a quaint wicker contrivance, oddly like a coffin in shape, and known in these parts as a machala. Hardcastle never marched, he was too fat and soft for much exercise. Pauline, with Satan clinging to her shadow, walked at the end of the procession. She was very much a boy this morning, her short hair cropped closer to her head, her girl’s clothes changed for a khaki shirt and shorts. These had been Hardcastle’s instructions, he had seen to the remodelling of some of his own . clothes to fit her. Pauline was glad enough of the freedom the clothes gave her, but very grateful that the nuns could not see her setting forth.

It had never occurred to Pauline how tired she would be before the day’s march was over, but to her father the knowledge brought quite a good deal of pleasant amusement. He was going to break her, as he had said, but first he was going to toughen and harden her so that the breaking should have more fun behind it. This was the beginning of his long-waited-for revenge. Half-way through the march he made his carriers fall back to the tail end of the procession so that he could be carried along and watch Pauline’s flagging steps, her dreary stumbles over any obstacle, however small, that came in the way of her weary feet. And it was Pauline’s mother that he saw in imagination, wetting his lips the while.

“In the Congo we are allowed to flog porters when they are lazy,” he called out once. “Step up, my girl, the nuns haven’t trained you to walk well.”

Pauline stepped up. Pride helped her through that first day. She got into camp footsore, bone weary, but still able to hold her head high, able to face his taunts with silent disdain. There was little rest for her when she arrived, he saw to that. She was to be his servant, his slave; getting his tea ready, making his bed.

Satan had disappeared as soon as they reached camp, and for the time being Hardcastle seemed to have forgotten him; for that at least Pauline was grateful.

Later, at night, when pacified by many whiskies, her father had fallen into heavy noisy slumber, Pauline heard the little tinkle of Satan’s fiddle outside and went to see if she could find him.

They had camped for the night in a cleared space on the edge of the road, two small green tents, a huddle of hastily erected grass huts for the porters and servants. A great fire had been lit, it burnt between the two tents, throwing fantastic lights and shadows over the flaps and ropes. And everywhere else except for its glitter there was heavy, black motionless night. Motionless, Pauline thought, as she stood trying to peer beyond the firelight in search of Satan, yet menacingly alive with life and fear.

In the end she was too tired really to seek out Satan, but turned back into her own tent and threw herself down on her bed, too thoroughly weary not to fall asleep at once.

But, if the first day’s march had been painful, the second day brought absolute agony to Pauline. Her bones ached, her feet were blistered, the white skin on her knees was inflamed and burnt by the sun. They were up with the dawn, there was packing to be done, things to be found and put away, tea once more to be made. Hardcastle was in a villainous temper, the porters cowed and subdued. There was no singing or shouting as they swung out on to the road and trailed away into the scarcely lifted morning mist. Supposing she were to refuse to go, say she could not walk any farther. Pauline stole a look at her father’s face, and to-day fear drove her as yesterday pride had done. Satan had already been kicked and buffeted down the road, she saw nothing of him the whole of that march. And long before it was over even fear had failed her and she had wept hot tears and been pitifully grateful to Hardcastle’s black woman who had shared a hammock with her for the last six miles.

The noise of the broad, slow moving river on whose banks they were camped, went with Pauline into her sleep that night, and in her dreams she tossed and moaned and caught her breath on held-back tears. Towards morning she was awakened by the feeling of soft hands stroking her face, and started up in bed to see the dim shadow of Satan crouched beside her.

“What is it?” she whispered in his own language, she had not yet succeeded in teaching him English. “Where have you been all day, Satan? Have you had any food?”

“Yes, I have eaten,” the boy answered. She thought in the dark that his eyes glowed like a cat’s. “Little white sister,” for that was his name for her, “it were well for us to run away. In the forest he will kill us.”

“But where could we run to?” whispered Pauline, thinking of her blistered feet, of the thirty-six odd miles that lay between her and refuge. “No, Satan, in the forest it will be better. He will have other things to think of; he will forget us.”

The boy shook his head and swayed backwards and forwards on his heels, humming some strange tune, Under his breath; “I have been in the forest,” he interrupted himself to say. “I know.”

“And I,” said Pauline philosophically, and out of her weariness really believing it, “am not at all afraid of death, Satan.”

He did not answer, and she saw his strange figure creeping out into the night again, saw it outlined against the firelight for a moment and, then disappearing into the darkness. Poor Satan; he had been in the forest before; he knew. Pauline was seized with quick contrition remembering his many scars. She should have told him to run away if he could, make him realize that he need not bother about her.

At the end of the fifth day of their weary marches Pauline was wonderfully hardened. She was young, she was healthy, youth and health reasserted themselves. She marched eagerly now, noticing the beauty of the morning; the mists that rolled away as the sun crept up, the dew-laden grass and flowers; the wind that scurried and blew about her; the soft, cold nights, the amazing moonlight that turned the earth into a thing of such fantastic beauty. She was beginning to love it all, even the porters with their shining skins, their jabbering humour, the quaint songs they chanted to lighten their load. And as her body hardened so did her mind. There was fierce hate in her heart, but very little fear left. And her hate she had learnt to hide, doing Hardcastle’s bidding with seeming acquiescence, never answering his taunts and jeers.

Only one thing remained to oppress her heart, and that was the strangeness that had come over Satan, for as they had drawn nearer to the forest, its outline lying before them for two days like some giant shadow on the horizon, Satan had grown increasingly queer in his behaviour. Generally so cowed and quiet, he put forth a truculent desire to make himself disagreeable. There was something inhuman in his chuckling laughter at her distress. He would catch the live small things they found along the road, lizards and frogs and fat-bodied grasshoppers, and he would bring them to her to show how he could pinch the life out of their throats between his cruel fingers. And then he would sing and dance and caper away from her remonstrances.

On the second week of their outward march they entered the forest, and here Hardcastle called a halt. He intended forming a permanent camp, leaving the bulk of his loads and porters under the charge of his head man, and pushing on into the forest as lightly encumbered as possible. Here, also, he was met by two other hunters, Belgians who were returning heavily laden with the spoils of a six months’ search. Late into the night Pauline heard their voices shouting and laughing over the camp-fire, keeping her father company, helping him to lighten some of the whisky, as he put it. Perhaps, because of their drunken revelry, perhaps because of some spell the forest was throwing over her, Pauline knew herself horribly afraid. In this green, cold world of shadows, in this forest of sombre trees and close-matted undergrowth, where such heavy silence reigned, and where she felt the presence of malign life she could not see or hear, anything might happen. She found her mind dwelling on the repulsive side of Hardcastle’s bullying. His soft hands that stroked his knees, his moist lips, his heavy eyes that watched and sneered and hated. And Satan’s strangeness terrified her. She felt so hopelessly alone. As if the whole awe-filled earth stood still in majestic disdain and waited to see her fight her last pitiful struggle against fate.

And, indeed, the crisis was nearer than she guessed. The next morning saw the departure of the Belgian gentlemen, still fuddled and aggressively cheerful, and then their own quickly conceived departure northwards into the forest—Hardcastle, sullen and dangerous after his night’s debauch, which had left him in a villainous temper, his two principal native hunters, twelve porters carrying their cut-down loads, and Pauline and Satan.

All morning they marched, and it seemed as though every step took them deeper and deeper into a primeval world of silence and gloom. You could imagine yourself going mad in these heavy silences, Pauline thought, and realized suddenly how necessary sunshine was to the human heart. She remembered Mother Magdalene’s words: “If you learn to hate, much of the sunshine of God will go out of your heart.” And it was true, dreadfully true. Her heart, chill with despair, hardened with hate, was like this forest, uncheered by sun or wind. Was she ever to win back to the sane gladness of God’s sunshine?

That evening Satan roused Hardcastle to one of those scarcely human gusts of rage that at times shook the drink-sodden brain. By his orders the boy was tied to a tree and beaten till the red lines showed across his gold skin and his shrieks of terror died down into little broken moans of pain. Pauline had shut out his shrieks sitting crouched together on the floor of the tent, her head buried in her arms, but she had not been able to shut her eyes to the limp form that the porters carried in and laid down beside her. Such fierce rebellion had blazed up in her heart that she had rushed out there and then, not waiting to think, and faced her father.

“You deserve to be killed,” she said. “If I had strength to kill you, I would do it, and I would not be sorry. Perhaps some day I shall be strong enough.”

Slim and straight she stood in front of him, with such hate in her heart and not enough strength in her two hands to kill a kitten.

Hardcastle watching her smiled, wetting his lips, stroking his knees.

“Ah,” he said, “it seems I have hardened you fairly well. It’s about time I broke you. Losimo,” he shouted out, and when the giant of a black boy stood in front of him, “give me your kiboka, put her down.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Pauline; instinctively she shrank, her eyes wide now with fear. “You aren’t going to——”

“I am going to break you,” Hardcastle interrupted; his lips played with the word. “I have been waiting for this, though you are possibly not aware of the fact, for more than thirteen years.”

So he broke Pauline. The terror and shame of that night seared far more than the girlish body.

Yet she made no sound, allowed no moan to escape her. When it was all finished and she was at liberty to creep away into the shadows of the tent, there was only one thought burning at the back of the pain in her mind.

It was finished, she could fight no more. Somehow or other she must drag herself away out of sight and sound of this man they would have her call father. The forest opened great black arms to take and hide her. In the forest she would find death, for the moment it seemed far better to her than life.

Chapter V

A Common-Sensible Young Man

Because of some dead woman’s eyes,
I bide my soul behind grim lies.

“The keynote to life in this or any other tropical country,” said Mr. Gallard, “is self-control.”

Not often given to talking, something this afternoon had stirred him to a flow of speech, and he lay back on his long chair on the veranda puffing at his cigar and propounding his carefully stored wisdom to his junior, young Robin Sterne.

It was Sunday and Robin had lunched with the Gallards, had been soothed by the correct daintiness of Mrs. Gallard’s surroundings and amused by her perfectly inconsequential chatter about passing events in the station. But all the time Sterne had been conscious of an undercurrent of unrest from Mr. Gallard’s side of the table, and it came now in this unwonted flow of conversation. Mrs. Gallard had retired for her afternoon’s rest, and the two men had been bidden to sit out on the veranda and not talk their “shop” too loudly.

Was Gallard talking shop? Sterne wasn’t quite sure. He was very interesting anyway, as Sterne had not imagined the precise, silent man could be, though he had always known that Gallard possessed a vast knowledge of the country and the people could he only be brought to talk. Well then, you boiled down knowledge and this man’s experience, and it came to this: “The keynote to life in this or any other tropical country is self-control.” Gallard certainly looked as though he had practised it.

“I guess one gets that rubbed into one at school,” suggested Sterne.

“Does one?” Gallard took him up. “I doubt if it is sufficiently impressed. You see, at home, there are many things, forces of law and order, public opinion, the feelings of our friends or neighbours, to keep us in check. Out here——” he paused and sat up to stare moodily across the expanse of banana covered hill spread out in front of them. “Have you realized yet, Sterne, that there is a particular kind of devil abroad in this land?”

“No,” said Sterne with perfect truth. “I can’t say I have, sir. Unless you can call a certain amount of perfectly justifiable irritation with fool servants the result of a particular kind of devil.”

“It is in a way,” Gallard nodded. “It is a country which leaves one prone to depression; irritation is a weapon which a great many of us use to ward off depression. And then anger takes root in us, and self-indulgence jogs our elbow. You know the two evils that dog down self-indulgence, eh?”

“I should imagine there were a good many of them, aren’t there?” asked Sterne.

“In this country it narrows down to two,” grunted Gallard; “and unless you have practised self-control till you know its manual inside out, those two evils will hound you to death. Drink,” he added, nodding his head at his companion, “and black women.”

Sterne knew himself flushing though he felt it to be absurd. “I don’t need much self-control against either of those two, sir,” he answered; “at least, not so far.”

“Ah, you are wise to add that,” agreed Gallard. He seemed to muse on the taste of his cigar, twisting it round and round in his mouth. “I have known not a few men ruined in this country,” he went on presently; “And if you are deputed to look into their affairs—an unsavoury job in sooth—you’ll find that one or other of those self-indulgences played a damned strong part in the ruin. Sometimes I feel as though the atmosphere put here was charged with forces that are out to break down if they possibly can our untrained self-control. For you are right there, our school education does try and instil it into us. Nature is against us out here, and those are the two strongest weapons in her hand—drink and black women.”

“Well,” said Sterne remorselessly, “I don’t know that I feel much sympathy with anyone going under owing to those causes.”

“Irritability, loneliness, home-sickness, monotony, nerves, ill-health,” Gallard went on, speaking almost to himself, “they all help to hound one down. It sits on my chest sometimes this country, and I can’t tell you why.” He shook himself, “Ever met Hardcastle?” he asked.

“No,” Sterne answered. He thought of Pauline. A funny little flickering thought that nearly brought the colour to his face again. Saw her as he had seen her in that brief moment when love had first come to him. “I met Miss Hardcastle, though, when she was staying with Mrs. Thomas.”

“Ah, the girl,” said Gallard, and bit suddenly on his cigar. “I used to know her mother. My God! What that woman suffered!”

“There was some story, wasn’t there?” asked Sterne. “Mrs. Thomas was telling me something of it the other day. The Hardcastles were here, weren’t they, when Mrs. Hardcastle ran away?”

“Yes, they were here,” answered Gallard—he lay back again, thin hands behind his head, brooding—“and so was I. New to the country in those days, in your shoes, Sterne, an A.D.C. Well, I am P.O. now and married, and very dried up and quiet, eh? Yet, sometimes, I still regret that I did not let temper get the better of me one night, fourteen years ago, when I might have killed Hardcastle and didn’t.”

“Too much self-control, sir,” suggested Sterne. “So I gather Hardcastle has always been a rotter, and still is.”

“I don’t know about always,” corrected Mr. Gallard. “He came to this country twenty years ago, like the rest of us, and the country was too much for him. Self-control was not exactly his motto, and those particular devils that I speak of took him well in hand. He treated his wife shamefully—God knows how he treats his daughter.”

“And she ran away?” asked Sterne, interested, with that flickering thought of Pauline still teasing his mind.

“She ran away with a native,” said Gallard, his voice suddenly harsh. “Ah, even now I hate to talk of it. She was a most beautiful girl. Like her daughter, yes, in a way. The same hair, the same eyes. And Hardcastle, well, he used to flog her, the natives said. She was alone with him out there. I suppose there were about two white people within a radius of thirty miles of her. I have always regretted,” he said it quite steadily, with no backward glance at the room curtained with dainty blue curtains where Mrs. Gallard lay exquisitely at rest, “that I did not persuade her to run away with me.”

He stood up, shaking his shoulders. “I used to think of her often,” he said; “it was a kind of haunting. They said, the natives, for Hardcastle would do nothing to help find her or bring her back, that the man had taken her back to the place from whence he came. Behind the mountains, they were very vague, to the great forest. How could we do anything? She went, I would have you understand, of her own free will, preferring that to what Hardcastle had given her. And she was only a child, English, gently reared, not too strong.” He swung round to Sterne. “That is why she didn’t take the child. She hoped that her world would rescue the child from Hardcastle’s clutches; she knew that her world would have no rescue for her. A married woman! Marriage was a more rigorous affair in those days, Sterne; women more tied down. God, how I’ve talked. It’s fourteen years to-day since Hardcastle, drunk that night as usual, told us the tale and laughed in the telling. Told it to me and the White Father at the mission.”

He sat down again. “They tell me, the natives once more, that Hardcastle is off again into the Congo, taking that girl with him. And I don’t mind telling you the news has upset me.”

Sterne sat silent, a little nonplussed. To begin with, the older man had spoken, stirred evidently by some very unusual emotion; and to go on with, the story had left Robin himself shaken, uncomfortable. Pauline’s mother, the girl whose eyes had wakened him to smouldering pity, whose hair had brushed so near his lips, and then this sordid tale of degradation and shame. For look at it how one might; the thing had to be degrading. A white, woman and a black man, the thought brought its little necessary shiver of disgust.

“It would have been better to have killed herself, wouldn’t it?” he said presently, reverting to Gallard’s story. “By jove, it makes one sick to think of the other thing.”

Gallard looked up at him. “No doubt she had the same idea herself,” he answered. “But death, Sterne, is not easy to come to of our own hands if we are sane and physically healthy. Her story is finished anyway.” He leant forward and threw the stump of his cigar into the garden. “I trust death found her years ago, and it is the daughter I am thinking of to-day. I’d trust Hardcastle with a white woman less to-day than those fourteen years ago. I want you to post out after him. He’ll be along the Congo road. We’ve got to settle up about that forest boundary. That can be your reason for the jaunt, and you can keep your eye on him. Do you understand?”

Sterne glanced at him. “Well, of course, I’m game to go, sir,” he argued. “But what will my powers be, exactly? Short of giving him a good hiding if I see just cause.”

“He is not likely to give you cause,” said Gallard’ quietly, “if he knows you are near enough to interfere. For thirteen years, more or less, I’ve watched Hardcastle, waiting for him to give me the chance of jumping on him, and he has never given it me yet. I have never even been able to persuade a native—out of the hundred he must at one time or another have ill-treated—to lay a complaint against him. They fear him as though he was God himself. No! But I’ve a sort of idea that in the wilds he may let himself go a bit. That’s where I want you to catch him.”

“I certainly will if I can,” said Sterne. Mrs. Thomas’s whispered words came back to him, Pauline’s’ tears, the pity, and the anger that had moved him. Away with common-sense, buckle on in preference the armour of romance! She was in trouble, she needed protection, his heart leapt to do her service.

“You are going out on safari, I hear,” said Mrs. Gallard over the tea cups to him. “Harry has just told me. I wonder if you’ll meet that child, Pauline. That brute of her father, they say, has dragged her off on one of his terrible shooting trips. He has cut her hair, my ayah tells me, made her dress as a boy. It’s wonderful, Mr. Sterne, the way these natives gossip amongst each other. I know Reverend Mother is quite upset at some of the things she has heard about her ewe lamb.”

And across the table Gallard and Sterne looked at each other with the same rather fierce expression awake in their eyes.

Sterne set forth next day. He took with him twenty-five porters, four eskaries, his personal boys, and an interpreter. It was his first safari, and when he did not remember the primary object of it, he enjoyed himself immensely. It is a glorious life this, of marching through the wild places of the world, pitching one’s tent each day in freshly beautiful scenes, roughing it just enough to stir the spirit of adventure in sluggish, over-civilized veins; yet with the comfort of a hot bath, a camp bed and good food always to hand.

And the country through which Sterne travelled was wonderfully beautiful. It had a background of great solemn hills, their topmost peaks snow laden, and his road carried him past wide papyrus covered swamps and crater lakes, their moveless waters studded with blue lotus lilies, and floating weeds of vivid green. Great trees abounded, their branches laden sometimes with flaming flowers, and everywhere the eye rested was green, the green of grass, the green of banana grove, the green of tree and shrub. It was a country well stocked with game, herds of bush and water buck, the smaller, daintier made antelope that leapt across his path; lions that roared all night, buffalo and elephant. He had amusement enough to distract his days, and he would have been quite glad to stay three or four days in some of the camps just for the sake of the shooting. However, apart from his initial project, he was out officially on tour, and that entailed moving from chief’s camp to chief’s camp, holding his barazas, listening to the cases that had been heard and tried by native justice, and trying to impart through his interpreter a certain amount of instruction as to the keeping up of roads, the paying of taxes and the upholding of Government’s laws.

That side of his work interested him, for Sterne took himself and his share in the building up of Empire very seriously in those days. It would be quite safe to say that of Pauline he thought hardly at all, though once or twice the memory of Gallard’s story, and the pity of it, swept over him. Then, on the fourteenth day out, a little slower than Hardcastle’s party had been, for he had taken his marches more peacefully and once or twice branched off the road, Sterne camped a day’s march from where they had camped on the edge of the forest, and found Hardcastle’s Belgian friends already ensconced there.

There is always a spirit of companionship when white men meet in the wilds. Sterne was not very addicted to Belgians, but he had fought side by side with them in Flanders, and that must always remain as a bond between the two nations. The Belgians dined with Sterne that night, an alfresco meal eaten in front of the blazing camp fire between the two camps. They drank heavily, and they told Sterne many strange, unbelievable tales of their prowess in the hunting field. And then, just at the end, they spoke of Hardcastle and their meeting with Hardcastle’s safari.

“A bad man but a great hunter,” said one. “I have known him these ten years.”

“He is travelling, is he not, with his daughter?” Sterne asked, and they stared at him and laughed.

“A daughter! Mon Dieu, in these parts. We travellers know better than to take white women with us, monsieur. No, we saw no daughter, we heard nothing of such a one.”

Sterne nodded to this information, though through the fumes of very strong whisky, which was rapidly fogging his brain, he was conscious of a sudden twinge of anxiety.

“And Hardcastle is making for where?” he asked. The Belgian who had spoken most all evening, being of the kind whose tongue gets much unloosened by wine, screwed up his eyes and answered.

“Ah, mon vieux, Hardcastle, where he goes? That is one of the secrets of the forest, and she has many. Perhaps, we guess, my friend and I. But even we, we are not sure. But there is—what would you call it—a legend—in these parts of a native chief who lives in the forest and who has great store of ivory hidden away. They say that it is from there that our friend gets those great ivory tusks he talks so much of.”

And then more fantastic tales rolled out with all the gust of a very inebriated Belgian. Sterne sat and listened. He was feeling stupid and dazed and he knew that he had been drinking too much. He felt, behind his intoxication, singularly disgusted with himself and not at all in the mood to make the excuses for his lapse which he might quite truthfully have put forward. He had had a hard day’s march, following by many hard days of marching and shooting, and drinking not at all. He was a boy who very rarely touched whisky. And then had come this dinner party and these two hard-drinking stiffs to keep pace with, the sense of fellowship, the lifting of the strain of loneliness. He could have found excuses if he had looked.

As it was, the feeling of bitterness rose and rose in him, till at last he sat quite silent, his chin propped in his hands, scowling at the fire, and at that the talkative Belgian, still able to move, decided it was time to retire, and jerked his slumbering companion awake. The two of them staggered off to their own tent, singing and hiccoughing, but Sterne stayed where he was.

Presently he fell asleep and was wakened by the excited voices of the porters, who were on duty round the fire. There was something beyond the usual spirit of argument in the sound, and Sterne staggered to his feet. His waking had been difficult, his body was chilled and stiffened by the position in which he had slept, his head ached furiously.

He stumbled over towards the fire, but to the end of his life he was glad that he did not lift his voice in the sharp shout of anger that prompted him. For, as he drew near, the circle of porters, who had risen and were standing in a little group round something, drew back and he saw what it was that had attracted their cries. Saw, yet scarcely believed his eyes, blaming at first the drink which still fogged his brain, then the moonlight where it waved with the firelight, causing such fantastic shadows. A slim, upright figure stood before him with some darker shadow crouched at its feet. The firelight glinted on bare white knees, on white hands, on a glimpse of white throat at the opening of the shirt. But the face was in moonlight, and misty, vague.

Sterne made no attempt to recognize it. He thought he saw in front of him a belated traveller of the same genus as he had entertained at dinner, and he had had more than enough of them.

“Have you lost your camp? “ he said, none too amiably. “What can I do for you?”

And at that there came a little choking cry from the stiffly held figure. It swayed towards him,

“It’s Mr. Sterne, isn’t it?” whispered Pauline, and crumpled up to fall at his feet.

Chapter VI

A Strange Wooing

My lips are shut to love. Yet see my heart,
I lay it at your feet. The past is past,
But in the fair, new days which are to come
My eyes shall speak, my lips be no more dumb.

In her determination to find kindly death in the forest Pauline had reckoned without Satan. Satan, brought many times to the border line of death by the cruelties practised on him, had nevertheless no intention of dying. The joy of life was rampant in his veins, and from one beating he never looked ahead to the next. The weals on Pauline’s fair skin, the blood where it oozed through her shirt, these things, however, roused him to a fiercer resentment than any of his own scars had ever done. From Pauline he had met kindness, and he had poured out in return the passionate affection of a wild animal—an affection which could not express itself in any form of self-improvement for her sake, but that would show itself fierce and quick in her defence.

“He has done this,” was his first comment on her condition. “I will kill him.”

He even showed Pauline how easily this could be accomplished. His hands were strong, the fingers supple, he would fasten them round that thick neck while the man slept, and press closer and closer till he died.

Sick and shaken, Pauline clung to Satan and exerted all her influence to prevent this—it seemed to her the last overwhelming act of horror.

“Yet, if he has beaten you once, he will beat often again,” Satan argued. Let them run away then.

He knew the forest, he was not afraid. In the forest there were places where the wild animals hid and no man could find them. Let them go there. Like the wild beasts, Satan did not look far ahead, and if it occurred to Pauline that food would be difficult to obtain, that danger would certainly exist from the very beasts he so blithely mentioned, she was too dazed, too sick with pain and shame, to worry about it.

She must get away somewhere, that thought remained, and since Satan elected to come with her and choose their path, she let him, that was all.

It cannot be said she trusted him, or that his presence brought her any comfort. These last few days had pushed them farther apart than they had ever been in their brief knowledge of each other. But she followed blindly where he led, and it is very certain that she would neither have gone so far nor concealed herself so successfully had it not been for his guidance. For all day they lay in hiding quite close to the camp and listened to the search that was set in action the moment Hardcastle woke up to the knowledge of their absence. They could hear his infuriated shouts and orders, the beating up of the bushes, the search parties that came and went.

She was too ill to take much notice of their retreat, but she imagined it to be the deserted home of some animal of the cat tribe. It was a dark, hollowed out space in the centre of a thickly overgrown wilderness of tree stems and bushes and huge stemmed creepers. All day she lay there on the leaves which Satan raked together to form a bed.

Her back was intolerably sore, the pain bringing in its wake hot fever and the doze of semi-consciousness. She was not even very afraid. Then night crept up, the dim glimmering light that reached them so faintly. through their curtain of green, fading, giving place to black, impenetrable darkness. And immediately the forest all round them woke to a multitude of faint, uneasy sounds. Things stirred and scampered through the undergrowth, strange cries echoed weirdly through the blackness. The two runaways might well have been afraid, but of things like that Satan did not know how to be afraid, and very merciful heavy sleep had shut Pauline’s eyes and dulled her senses.

She woke to what must have been dawn, for though no sign of light had as yet reached them, they could hear the sounds of the camp astir. Evidently Hardcastle intended to move on without them. Creeping to the end of the low overgrown passage that led from their green cave, Satan came back jubilant with the information.

“The tents are packed, the porters are loaded,” he said. “In a little while they will have gone and then we will go out, you and I, and look for food.”

She heard him apathetically. For herself, she had no desire for food and certainly no wish to move. Movement was torture to her, yet when he went the second time and beckoned to her she did her best to follow.

Satan’s ideas of food were indeed strange. He tried to tempt her to a lizard that he caught with some skill and partially roasted over the deserted ashes of the camp fire. But she turned so sick and faint at the sight that even he realized that the idea was absolutely repugnant to her—and contented himself by consuming it hastily with his back turned to her. After that he brought her wild berries, small round green things, bitter to the taste, yet with a juice in them that she found greatly refreshing.

As to their path, that offered no difficulties to him. He set his nose, as a dog might have done, to the trail of the path they had come, and followed it, keeping always just on one side and out of sight of the beaten track. So they came, though how she managed it, Pauline scarcely knew, to the place where they had first camped on the edge of the forest, and rested there for the night. There Satan left her for the space of nearly an hour, instructing her first how to climb up into the branches of a great spread-out tree, and when he returned it was with a gourd of sour-smelling milk and three fresh eggs.

Where he had got them, whether he had paid for them or stolen them, Pauline did not ask. She was at any rate, very grateful for them; breaking the eggs up and mixing them in the milk, realizing that the additional nourishment thus obtained must be very necessary to her.

Here, at the edge of the forest with the shadows of the trees a little drawn back from them, it was very much lighter. She could see the stars and far away the outlines of the mountains under whose shadow she had been reared. And away from the forest Satan seemed to grow less like the strange wild animal he had been of late and became more human. He gathered together great bundles of fire sticks and built and lit a small fire, sitting huddled over it all night, feeding it whenever the flame grew. small. And that night Pauline stayed awake and knew what it was to be thoroughly afraid of the wild noises that came from the forest.

With early dawn they were away again, following the road more openly now, since all fear of any scouts that might have been left by Hardcastle seemed to have faded from Satan’s mind. But with the heat of the sun, for here on the open plain between the forest and the river there was very little shade, Pauline found walking an impossibility. Fever took her into its grip again, she swayed and fell to rise and fall again. So that Satan had to drag her into the shadow of one of the few trees that grew near them and squat down, patiently to wait till the rest and the cool breeze of evening brought her fresh strength. Then they toiled forward again, and in the middle of the night came upon the twinkling lights of Sterne’s camp, the blazing bonfire, the excited porters.

Pauline woke from the faint which had sent her stumbling to Sterne’s feet to find herself lying on a camp-bed in a dimly-lit tent. Her shirt and shorts were gone; she was in pyjamas of some pleasant silky material, and the feel of cool sheets against her wearied feet was infinitely refreshing. She lay for a little, just sensing all this comfort, and then memory came back to her, and she sat quickly upright, the hot flush staining her cheeks.

Sterne was at her side in a moment, and in the far corner of the tent she saw the dim outlines of Satan’s huddled-up sleeping form.

“You are better?” Sterne said, his voice sounded strained, his eyes did not meet hers.

“Yes,” said Pauline; she made a movement almost as though to get up. “Who put me here, in this bed? What happened? Did I faint or something silly?”

“You fainted,” he agreed. “You have been through enough to make twenty girls faint. I—I undressed you and put you in here. It seemed the best thing to do.”

She did not answer, and he went on speaking quickly to hide the awkwardness between them. “The boy who was with you told me how it happened. I—if I meet him now—I will kill the man who has done this to you.”

Pauline lay back, her eyes shut. She was only conscious of bitter, haunting shame. She would have liked to die and never have had to open her eyes again to his eyes that had seen so much. And, looking at her, stirred by some impulse he scarcely understood, Sterne knelt down abruptly and lifted those small clenched hands to his lips.

“My dear,” he said, his voice was almost a whisper. “Never, while I live, shall such a thing happen to you again. You will give me the right, won’t you, to protect and take care of you always?”

The little hands tore themselves from his, and with a sob Pauline turned, burying her face in the pillow.

“Oh, go away, go away!” she wept. “Leave me alone, I feel so ashamed, so horribly ashamed.”

The tears were merciful. She stayed thus, face hidden, the sobs shaking her, and Sterne paralysed as are some men in the presence of a woman’s tears, could find nothing to say to soothe or comfort. In the end he got up stiffly and crept from the tent as a man might do who has suffered a rather painful defeat. Outside he walked up and down, up and down, and cursed Hardcastle and his own inability to cope with a difficult situation tactfully, and stopped every now and then by the tent door to listen and hear if that torturing noise still continued.

Pauline cried for some time;. the sobs choking themselves on tears, the tears bringing fresh sobs. Then like a child tired out with sorrow, as indeed she was, the sobs finished on little caught-up breaths and she fell asleep, her cheeks pressed against a sodden pillow, the lashes wet above her cheeks.

Dawn was breaking in the sky, great lines of red and gold heralding the sun’s coming, while up above in a sky, turning from misty grey to blue, the stars faded. When Sterne tip-toed back into the tent he found her asleep. He was tired out himself by then, he had not yet properly slept off the effects of last night’s excess. And much had happened to tear at his nerves since then; Pauline’s faint, the feel of her limp body in his arms as he carried her to the tent, the sight of her poor tortured flesh, and Satan’s poured-out story. For, through the interpreter hastily summoned from his night’s slumber, Satan had told all that there was to tell of degradation, and cruelty, which had stooped to find pleasure in so many small yet wicked ways.

Sterne’s heart had burnt with indignation, it had flamed to a passionate desire to protect, but only in that second when he had been prompted to kneel beside her and kiss her hands, had he thought of love. And then it was only for a moment. It was not along such roads as these that he had planned or looked for love to come.

He was tired now, anyway, and in five minutes he too was asleep, stretched out on the deck chair that occupied the other half of his tent.

So these three people, who had been thrown together so curiously, slept, and outside night trailed her garment of mist and cloud over the forest, and day stalked abroad across a sky of vivid blue. Satan was the first to wake. The noises of the stirring camp touched his ears, and like some lithe wild animal he was awake at once leaping to his feet looking for some place to hide in since the friendly dark had removed its protection from his limbs. His eyes rested first on Pauline and then on Sterne and then came back again to Pauline. He seemed to study her fiercely, and once or twice his lips moved, as though he whispered something to himself. Then he moved forward and, slipping between the two sleepers, quite noiselessly lifted the flap of the tent and disappeared outside.

None, it would seem, saw him go. Afterwards, when Sterne questioned the porters, the servants, none of them had seen or heard him. It was as though he had vanished into the newly born day.

Pauline herself woke later, when the flap of the tent being lifted, a warm rush of sunshine streamed in straight on her face. One of the Belgian travellers stood in the opening staring in some perplexity, from the girl on the bed to Sterne’s slumbering form.

“Pardon, Madame,” he said, seeing that Pauline’s eyes were Open. “I had no idea that Madame travelled with Monsieur. I looked in to say good-bye—we proceed with our journey, my friend and I.”

Most of this he said from outside the tent whose flap he had discreetly dropped on finding there was a lady within.

Pauline slipped out of bed quickly, and wrapping a blanket round her pyjama-clad limbs, went over to shake Sterne awake. Shame still tingled in her veins, but somehow it blended with annoyance at seeing him so calmly, as it were, cheerfully asleep.

“Please wake up,” she said firmly. “There is a white man outside. He has seen me. You’ll have to go out and speak to him.”

Sterne woke slowly, and Pauline thought he looked very stupid, his sleek hair all rumpled, his eyes red and heavy with sleep. Indeed there was little romance between them for the moment.

“Please, do hurry up,” she repeated. “It is very awkward for me that he should be there, that he should have seen me.”

Sterne struggled to his feet, muttered that he was “awfully sorry “ and strode out of the tent. She could hear him talking to the man outside, caught the sound of laughter and explanations. Then there were shouted good-byes and Sterne came back to the tent.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed by then, the blanket still wrapped round her, clutched against her. She wore it as a sort of armour to protect her modesty. Sterne’s eyes met hers, and he flushed uneasily.

“He thinks you are my wife,” he said. “There were two of them, two Belgians. They dined with me last night, they are pushing on to Fort Portal.”

“And you?” Pauline asked. “How did you explain, what did you tell them?”

“What could I say?” he answered. “He saw you here, it’s my tent, you must have been here all night.”

“Does that matter?” she said. “I mean, isn’t it better to be truthful? I am not your wife.”

“I want you to marry me,” he explained doggedly. “I’d be good to you, Pauline,” he said her name half shyly, he felt suddenly very hot and uncomfortable. “And it gives me the right to keep you away from—well, from Hardcastle.”

“If I don’t marry you I shall have to go back?” asked Pauline. She spoke as a child might speak, ignoring all the deeper issues of the question, her mind fixed only on the possibility of a dread return. “Can he make me go back?”

“I don’t see what is going to stop him,” said Sterne. “You are his daughter. And even if he did not want you back he’d be cad enough to say you had run away to me—and then these Belgian chaps——” He broke off, perplexed as to how to make her understand the full awkwardness of their position.

Pauline watched him with grave eyes, the blanket held against her heart, her face white and strained with all she had been through and the tempest of her tears.

“And you would marry me?” she asked. “Ought not people to love each other before they get married?”

“Well, they do as a rule,” he agreed awkwardly. Something quite unexplainable clamoured within him wishful to say, “And I—I do love you.” He thrust it back, it was ridiculous and she would not understand. “But I think we would get on all right. We’d—well, we’d be good pals.”

She sat considering this, her brows puckered to a frown. She knew so little of these two strange words, love and marriage. That side of life had not come into the nuns’ teachings, and she had grown up without girl companions. It was as a closed book to her, this mystery of life and love and sex. Yet in his bald statement, “we would be good pals,” she felt instinctively that something was lacking; she was stupidly inclined to cry again, and stiffened herself to withstand weak tears.

“Very well,” she said slowly. “It’s kind of you. I’ll try not to be a nuisance if you marry me. I’d like to be good pals.”

So they became engaged. Surely the strangest of all courtships. And if he was oddly stirred by the little caught-back quiver of the lips as she formed the words “ good pals,” he fought down the feeling hastily, turning eagerly to the commonplace details of breakfast and a change of clothes for her.

“Do you feel well enough to travel to-day?” he asked. “I can have you carried. I think we ought to get back as soon as possible and get things settled up before Hardcastle’s return.”

He felt very keenly the awkwardness of her position alone with him, a thing that troubled her not at all.

Not until the camp was struck and the cavalcade ready to start, Pauline being carried by four porters in a machala, did they miss Satan, and then he was nowhere to be found.

“He has gone back to the forest,” said Pauline with apathetic calm. Satan seemed part and parcel of the days she so longed to forget. “He always seemed to me to belong there. I think he will be quite happy now that he is free.”

Chapter VII

The First Kiss

On such a night as this, by some brief, spell,
Love rules the world.
And all the truth my heart and mind would seek Into love’s net are hurled.
Ah love! My eyes are blind. Hold fast my hand,
And lead me with you to some spellbound land.

Mrs. Thomas was, of course, delighted. She felt that her dearest schemings had been realized.

“It was so thrilling that it should have happened this way,” she confided to Mrs. Gallard. “So awfully romantic. Alone on safari. I’ve always thought, moonlight nights on safari were really ideal for love scenes.”

Mrs. Gallard, who had been the bearer of the good news, a runner having come in to her husband from Sterne that morning, smiled a little sceptically at the other’s delight.

“It is romantic enough,” she agreed. “Yet I expect there was also about it a certain grim necessity. It is extremely awkward for a young man to have a girl on safari with him—no other white companionship, and only one tent. I don’t see, my dear, that there was anything else for him to do but propose, and certainly no road of escape for her but accepting him.”

Mrs. Thomas half frowned. “He was really beginning to be in love with her before,” she insisted. “I noticed it in his eyes when he looked at her.”

“The more fortunate for him,” said Mrs. Gallard. “He is taking her straight to the nuns, he tells my husband. She has had a touch of fever, is not too well. Sterne talks of the wedding being in a month or two.”

“I hope Mother Magdalene won’t try and interfere,” sighed Mrs. Thomas, and stooped to pick baby Dick off the floor. “After all, Nanette, jeer as you like, matrimony is the best thing for us, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never jeered at matrimony in my life,” asserted Mrs. Gallard with all solemnity. “It is the romance of it that occasionally makes me smile. Perhaps, because Harry and I have never been what you could exactly call romantic.”

There is, of course, romance and romance in this world, and we each of us come into our romantic country a different way. Was he in love? Sterne had arrived at the time when he was quite seriously asking himself that question. He was for one thing held back from acknowledging love. It brought him a sense of swift alarm and shame to find that the girl’s presence stirred him strangely. Those moonlit nights, of which Mrs. Thomas spoke so enthusiastically, were, he found, very disturbing. He was, perhaps, afraid of himself, afraid of the something primitive and fierce that stirred in his veins. She attracted him, his hands longed to touch her; he found her lips, the soft curves of her neck and throat, the waves of her hair, bewilderingly attractive. But was this not only because she was a woman, he a man, and they were perilously thrown together? There were nights which he spent brooding over the camp-fire, afraid to face the dim silence of the tent where she lay so placidly asleep. There were afternoons and evenings during which he most strenuously stalked game, walking for miles endeavouring to tire himself out, mind and body, so that he should be able to sit beside her and be unmoved by any rebellious impulses. For when he was with her, when he realized her calm acceptance of their companionship, their aloneness, he was conscious of being horribly ashamed of his wild thoughts. But was he in love? That he was very distrustful of saying. He shut his eyes to the brief moments in which real knowledge had flamed up before his eyes. He was not prepared to be content with instinct. He meant to love her, since he meant to marry her, but love according to all his preconceived notions must be a thing of slow, sweet growth—not a sudden leaping force as was this strange desire that at times shook him.

As for Pauline, she was indeed calm in her acceptance. Sex slept within her, she never gave it a thought. It had never been allowed to obtrude itself in her life or teaching. She was not ignorant, but she was in all senses of the word innocent. And she had been through much in the past few months that had shaken her nerves, weakened her mental and physical health. She could not think very much. Sterne, in offering to marry her, seemed to open up a road of escape from the hurtful, evil things that contact with her father had brought her. She was content to take that road and not perplex her already over-tired heart with wondering as to what lay beyond.

So they journeyed on their way back to Fort Portal, taking their time over the trip, since Sterne realized that the girl was really too played out for much exertion, yet never stopping for more than one day in any place since he was really very anxious to be quit of the whole perplexing business.

They came to their last camping place before they should reach Fort Portal with nothing said between them. All day Sterne had been held in a particularly grim silence. He was arguing things out with himself, his thoughts a strange jumble of “musts” and “wont’s” and, with the end of their journey so nearly in sight, it seemed to him disastrous that there should be nothing definite as to their respective feelings decided between them. Nature, too, on this the last night of this testing, seemed to take sides against him; It was a wonderful evening, laden with soft, sweet scents. Some past D.C. had had the camp enclosure planted with great clumps of tuberoses, and to-night they raised their scented heads and stood like sentinel spears of white under the moonlight. Pitched on the side of a hill as the camp was, it lay half in shadow, and the country in front of them stretched away, dark, softly touched shapes of hill and valley, with over them all a sky of purple blackness lit by great, splendid stars. The camp, the little band of poles and thatch, their pitched tent, stood in a cleared enclosure, surrounded by a low fence against which the tuberoses raised their fragrant heads, and beyond the fence again was the porter’s encampment, the bonfire round which their grotesque figures huddled. Supper—Pauline and Sterne ate it out in the open, the table laid for them just beyond the ropes of their tent—was a silent meal, and supper over, the servants slipped away to partake of their own noisy feast beyond the precincts of the fence. You could not say the two white people were in any sense alone—the air resounded with the shouted conversation of the porters, excited and pleased at being so near the end of their journey. Beyond the fence, figures came and went; within the tent, Jusufu, Sterne’s industrious head boy put everything ready for the night. Yet, though they were not alone, a very definite sense of shut-awayness descended on Sterne and Pauline as they sat out there. It moved even Pauline to a mood of unrest. She stirred and gathered his coat about her, for she had had to borrow most of his clothes, having brought nothing with her on her flight.

“How heavy the scent of the flowers is,” she said, to break the silence. “It’s nice, but it is rather overpowering, isn’t, it?”

Sterne looked across at her. They were only the space of the small table apart. He could see her face very clearly, half turned from him, the tilt of her chin, the curve of her lips almost irresistibly beautiful. And for the moment everything was combining to slacken the rein with which he had held in all thoughts of desire.

He stood up abruptly. “How about a stroll?” he said. “Do you feel like it?”

She noticed that his voice sounded strange and harsh.

She stood up at once. Implicit acquiescence to his smallest wish seemed to her only to repay in some very poor way his kindness to her. For behind all her calm acceptance of their position she was not indifferent to the kind thought that had prompted his proposal.

“Yes, let us,” she agreed. “It is a perfectly beautiful night. I never remember, seeing a moon like this, or such great, wide-eyed stars.”

“I don’t think we need the lamp,” said Sterne gruffly. He stepped in front of her to lead the way. “The moon is light enough, and we won’t go beyond call. Do the shadows frighten you?” he asked, as a twist in the little path hid them from the fire. “Why not put your hand on my arm?”

She did it unquestioningly, quite unaware of the quick thrill of flame that swept him from head to foot. But she heard him catch his breath, and instinctively she slid her hand down till it found and caught at his.

“What was it?” she whispered. “Did you hear something?”

He could have laughed at her blindness to the forces shaking him, and suddenly he was tired of the pretence. Let it be desire then, let him name it and call it as such, and see if he could not kindle a like flame in her heart.

He stopped and swung round to her, pulling her soft, pliant body into his arms. His hands were rough, he was too shaken to remember gentleness or courtesy.

“Let me kiss you, Pauline,” he said. “Will you hate it if I kiss you?”

The thrill in his voice, the sharp tension of his hands stirred her, yet she was only half afraid as she lifted her face to his.

“Do you want to?” she asked, and for all her bravery, her ignorance, she could not make her voice much more than a whisper.

And at that the last chord of self-restraint snapped in the man. Her upheld face, her shadowed eyes, the outlines of her lips, tempted him. His heart pounded, his head swayed, with half a cry he caught her to him and his lips found hers.

The world surged round Pauline. She wanted foolishly to cry, she wanted to press close to him and hide her face against his coat, she wanted to turn and run away into the darkness.

She did none of these things, but he felt her grow stiff and cold under his hands, and sudden remorse came to him.

“Good God,” he said, and let go of her, half pushing her away. “What an utter cad I am.”

The hoarse, shaken emotion of his voice, the strength of his contrition brought the fright to Pauline’s heart that all his violence had not conveyed. It was as though he acknowledged sin in this act he had committed, and of sin Pauline had a well ingrained horror. She had felt a swarm of conflicting emotions as he held her, and that they had been half pleasurable seemed, in the face of his contrition, the more degrading. She turned back towards the camp, and calling all her small store of worldly wisdom to her aid tried to speak indifferently.

“I am going back,” she said. “Please don’t bother to come with me.”

In a second he was at her side. She could see his face all marred and strange, his hot hands caught at hers.

“You are going to forgive me,” he said. “Pauline, you aren’t going to let it make any difference? I’m going to make you love me, but, before God, until you do I promise you, dear, I won’t let myself go like that again. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know how much I wanted you till I felt you in my arms, till I kissed you. Pauline, say you are going to forgive me, that you trust me enough to marry me even after this.”

“Please,” said Pauline; she pulled her hands away, she was frightened because, when he held her, such strange instincts seemed to be prompting her to stay quiet in his hands. “Please, don’t let us say anything more about it. I am not angry, but I don’t particularly like being kissed.” She tried to laugh a little. “No one ever has kissed me like that before,” she said.

That night, for the first time since her reception into Robin’s safari, Pauline could not sleep. She dreaded his intrusion into the tent, a thing she had never given a thought to before; yet now, she realized it without recognizing it, something was between them, something born of his burning kiss, and she was all woman in her desire for flight and concealment from what she vaguely realized to be man’s love.

She need not have been alarmed. His own unpremeditated flash of passion had raised a barrier as sharp as a naked sword between herself and Robin. He spent the night restlessly tramping far afield with a lamp and a gun bearer in a fictitious search for leopards.

Morning saw him back at the camp ready to start off their safari. White of face, haggard of eye, but very quiet. Never looking at her, scarcely speaking at all.

So they came into Fort Portal and were greeted by Mrs. Thomas with a little rush of congratulatory words. Mrs. Thomas stopped the column, on its way up to the mission.

“You two dears,” she gushed. “I always wanted this to happen. I think it’s delightfully clever of you to have brought it off all on your own in the wilds. Now we shall really have a wedding at Fort Portal. You must let me help you, dear,” this to Pauline sitting in her machala more than usually quiet under the flow of words. “Mother Magdalene must spare you to me for a few days at a time.”

Perhaps she became too suddenly aware of the tension in Sterne’s silence, of his white, tired face, for she broke off her eloquence awkwardly and flushed as she studied the two.

“I hope you are going to be awfully happy,” she said hurriedly. “I ought to have wished that first, oughtn’t I?”

Then she let them go on and returned to the house rather perturbed. But as big Dick was out, there was no one but the baby to confide in, and baby Dick was really not in the least interested in the possibilities for happiness of a newly engaged couple.

The nuns received Pauline with open arms and fluttering exclamations of pity and delight. Sterne they rather ignored, though Mother Magdalene held his hand in hers for more than a minute and studied his face with anxious eyes that apparently found reason for reassurance in their search.

“Our little Pauline,” she said, “you have brought her back, only to take her away again—is it not so, Mr, Sterne? Mr. Gallard read me your letter.”

“I hope she will marry me,” agreed Robin, “but I do not wish to seem to lay any prior claim to her, Reverend Mother; it must be as you and she think best.”

“And it is undoubtedly best for Pauline to marry,” said Mother Magdalene softly. “I feel you will be good to her. She will need gentle treatment, Mr. Sterne.”

Before God she should have it! Sterne went back to the station with that thought hot in his heart. If he had failed in gentleness the night before, he was the more sorry now. He found Mr. Gallard in the office and gave the old man a brief account of his adventure, of Pauline’s arrival, her pitiful condition and his decision.

“As I wrote you, sir, I have asked her to marry me, and she has done me the honour to consent. That sounds ridiculously stilted, yet it conveys my real feelings.”

“And when you have married her?” said Gallard. “What do you propose to do? Will you take some advice from me, Sterne? I don’t want to seem officious, but I am, as I have given you reason for knowing, more than just merely interested in this affair.”

“I am quite willing to be advised, sir,” said Sterne. “I want to do the best I can.”

“I won’t ask if you love her,” said Gallard, “that would be impudent interference. I can only say—if you love her and she loves you, no advice is necessary, go forth and prosper, my son. But I am also not unable to realise that this question of marriage has been more or less thrust on both of you, and love is a thing, Sterne, that can’t be coerced or governed. Life’s full of pitfalls for the two of you if that is the case.” He moved the papers about on his table and looked up quickly at Sterne. “Mother Magdalene has written me a letter,” he said, “in which she insists very strongly on the wisdom of persuading you to send Miss Pauline home as soon as possible after the wedding. She urges, quite truthfully, that the girl has been through too much out here, that the place must be full of hurtful memories. England, she claims, will bring her back a sense of peace and security. And, very delicately, she hints that marriage on top of all her other experiences might be too much for the girl’s physical health. I don’t know where Mother Magdalene got her worldly wisdom, but she undoubtedly is wise in many ways.”

“And you agree with her?” asked Sterne.

“In this case, no, most decidedly no,” said Gallard abruptly. “Here is where my diffidently offered advice comes in. If you marry the girl you must keep her with you; if she goes home she must go untrammelled by any mock ceremony of marriage.”

“But Hardcastle?” suggested Sterne. “The fact that she has been with me——?”

Gallard waved his suggestions aside. “I think I have sufficient evidence now to frighten Hardcastle into acquiescence, and as for the rest, we are a small community up here, Sterne, and not, I hope, a bitter-tongued one.”

Sterne stood silent, fighting the battle out in his mind. He hardly realised how sharply Gallard’s words had brought him to a realization of the truth. He only knew that suddenly it was shining out in front of him, undeniable, radiant.

“And what if I love her?” he asked. “If I cannot bear to let her go?”

Gallard stood up and held out his hand. “Then marry her,” he said. “Make her love you. With all my heart I wish you joy. But I wanted to hear you say that, Sterne. I wanted to save the child from a marriage built on anything else.”

“That is not to say she loves me,” said Sterne. He had a swift memory of her pliant form, her soft, warm lips against his own, and flushed, and at that Mr. Gallard laughed.

“We’ll have to leave the ladies to find that out,” he said. “Meanwhile come home to lunch, the wife will be delighted to learn all the latest details of the romance.”

Chapter VIII

Love Is Self-Sacrifice

Strong hands, that knew not what ’twas theirs to hold,
My heart goes free. And yet,
Till the last journey finds our youth grown old,
My heart will not forget!

They were married six weeks later in the little chapel where the sisters had first taught Pauline to pray. It was a day like that on which Sterne had found Pauline crying under the banana trees. Little fleecy white clouds chased each other across a blue sky, the wind fluttered all the banana trees, and in the distance the great hills raised their heads distinct and clear, their trees outlined, their precipices and ravines showing like great patches of shadow against the sunshine.

Sister Augustine and Sister Veronica had decorated the chapel. It was full of white, scented flowers, its altar dim and mysterious in the shadows, with the candles glittering like strange stars. And from where they knelt at the altar steps, if he lifted his head, Sterne could see a roughly cut, arched window with no stained glass in it, but, more beautiful still, a clear vista of blue sky and the branches of a tree laden with purple bloom. The beauty, the dimness of the altar, the hushed voice of the priest, Pauline’s figure kneeling beside him, the outline of her clear-cut face, the touch of her soft cold hand, all stirred him to a sense of exaltation that amounted to the immolation of self. He prayed as he knelt there that his life might be one of service to her, that he might guard and shield her from the least shadow of tears and pain.

And Pauline? Well, a girl’s mind is so difficult a thing to gauge. Much of the childish glory of “let’s pretend” still abides there. This last six weeks had passed for Pauline like a dream. The hurtful, haunting things of her life with her father had scarred her undoubtedly; she was still, as Mother Magdalene wistfully said, a little dazed, a little numbed physically and mentally. Mother Magdalene had found her hard to talk to when she had tried to tell her of the facts of life. And it was not given to Mother Magdalene to be very explicit about these things. How should she tell of man’s love when the breath of it had never come near her own heart?

And how much did Pauline realise or know of the step she was taking? Mother Magdalene wondered as to that, the doubt obtruded itself between her and her prayers.

Of Robin, Pauline had seen very little during these last six weeks. For one thing the nuns had gone into retreat for three weeks, taking Pauline with them, thinking that the silence, the shut-awayness from the world would be the best rest they could provide for the girl’s overtaxed nerves. And, in a sense, they had achieved their purpose, but Pauline had come back to everyday things and her meetings with Sterne so shy, so reserved, that he found it impossible to put into words before her the tumult of his love. They had strange little interviews together, the colour coming and going in Pauline’s cheeks, her eyes never meeting his, and for some unhappy reason Sterne connected this avoidance in her manner with his conduct on the night before they reached Fort Portal. He opined that she was afraid of him; and the knowledge hurt him and made him very determined that she should never have cause to fear again.

Whereas, if the truth had been told, when Pauline thought of those few brief moments when he had held her in his arm’s, and it was only natural that such an experience should remain paramount in a girl’s thoughts, it was with a little thrill of pleasurable excitement, of which she conceived it her duty to be half ashamed.

Strange material out of which to build a wedding. Fortunate that most of the priest’s remarks passed completely over Pauline’s head and left her with only a very vague idea of solemn hushed prayers, the candles at the altar, the perfume of the flowers.

They motored down after the ceremony to the Gallards’ house where the reception was to be held, and where they were to lunch before starting on their motor trip down to Kampala. Sterne had been granted a fortnight’s leave, and Gallard had recommended his taking Pauline down to Kampala, the big town of the Protectorate, instead of spending the honeymoon on safari. So Pauline said good-bye to the nuns for the second time in her life, knelt to receive Mother Magdalene’s blessing, heard her whispered words, “Remember, Pauline, little Pippa, whom we have cherished, love shows itself in self-sacrifice. Love God and your husband, Pippa, and forget yourself. So will you find happiness.

Then came the laughing, cheery crowd at the Gallards’, Mrs. Thomas to help her change her wedding dress, for Mrs. Thomas, had been very busy and very enthusiastic over the trousseau. The lunch, where she sat between Robin and Mr. Gallard, and where everyone seemed to make speeches and drink their health. And then the quick goodbyes, the showers of rice, engineered again by Mrs. Thomas, the motor car with Robin sitting close beside her, and the trees and the hills and the houses of Fort Portal slipping away behind her. She was married, this man was her husband. Never before in all her life had she felt so shy, so embarrassed, so uncomfortable.

“Are* you tired?” asked Robin; he kept his voice as studiously indifferent as he could. “It has been a long morning. I am glad it is over.”

“Yes,” agreed Pauline, anxious to break into conversation since silence was so awkward, “It is awful getting married, isn’t it?”

It was this sense of something stiff between them which could only have been broken by Sterne turning to her and gathering her into his arms, that drove him on their second day out together, to say to Pauline very stiffly:

“I want you to realise that you are to do whatever you like. Either stay out here with me, which means, of course, coming back to Fort, Portal, or go home to England. My mother, I know, will love to have you. It would not be necessary to wait till we heard from her.”

“If I go back to Fort Portal,” said Pauline slowly, “I shall see him again. The idea does terrify me.”

“Then you would rather go home?” he asked. They were staying that night at the little rest camp at the foot of Nubendi Hill. They had had their supper, they were alone again as they had been those nights before their wedding. Behind them stood the little stiff tin house that was to shelter Pauline for the night; Sterne had had his tent pitched alongside of it.

Pauline looked up at him. She was very conscious of the reserve which held him. Before on their past safari until the night when he had kissed her, they had been cheerful companions, sharing everything, obliged to share one tent since that was all Sterne had. But this time he had kept so rigorously apart. She saw again, in imagination, the untidy bedroom that the Thomases shared, the two beds side by side, the medley of man’s things on Mrs. Thomas’s dressing-table. She could not help comparing, wondering.

“Mother Magdalene thought it would be best for me,” she said. “But—I only don’t want to be a nuisance to you.”

“I don’t come into the question,” he answered. “If you want to go home, I shall quite understand.”

Pauline looked round her. The tin hut stood against a dark background of trees, the hill of Nubendi reared itself up behind, blocking out the sky, and in front of them the clouds were banking themselves together, threatening a storm, their blackness lit from time to time by streaks of lightning. It was an oppressive night. It made her think suddenly of her father, of that horrible scene in the forest, of Satan’s shrieks and her own terror and pain. She longed to put out her hand and catch at Robin’s that lay on the table beside her, she passionately desired, at that moment, his protection, his sympathy. But these last two days had shown him so cold, so reserved. She felt that he avoided her, dreaded any contact with her.

Pauline shivered a little. “I’ve never seen. England,” she said. “And sometimes I feel as though I hated Africa.”

“It sounds as though it was to be home,” said Sterne, and laughed a little hardly. “We’ll have to see what we can fix up in Kampala.”

So, disregarding Gallard’s wise advice, home it was to be. They had very little further discussion about it. From the hotel in Kampala, Sterne cabled his mother and received her answering wire of congratulations and welcome. He secured a berth for Pauline on a liner sailing within the fortnight, and took another week’s leave in order to see her off from Mombasa himself. There were several people whom he knew in Kampala whose wives and families were travelling by the same boat. Pauline would have companionship all the way; his mother would, he knew, meet her in London. Once settled it was a load off his mind. He seemed himself to have arrived at an impossible tangle in his affairs. He loved Pauline and she was his wife, but he felt convinced that she was quite unawake to both these facts. And with Mother Magdalene’s murmuring warning and Mrs. Gallard’s open comments in his ears, he dreaded lest he should make the wakening clumsily. He could not trust himself to be for ever patient; he might lose his head as he had lost it once before. In six months’ time his leave was due, he would follow her to England, he would set himself to win her as a man wins the girl he loves.

On the evening before she sailed, he tried to tell her some of his thoughts and left her more bewildered than she had been before. He was coming home to her in six months, she was not to forget him quite. “That evening at the camp, when I held you and kissed you, Pauline, was it all hateful to you? Some day shall we be able to love each other, do you think?”

Love him! Was not this love that knocked wildly at her heart, that flooded her whole being with warmth?

“I——” she began, but he interrupted her passionately.

“Ah, don’t let us speak of it now. I had no right to ask. In six months, Pauline, we’ll look at things with clearer, steadier eyes. You shall answer me in six months.”

He was very mistaken, Gallard could have told him, but he was at least very valiant in his mistake. One may be sure his reserve, his silence, cost him not a little.

The next day the boat sailed for England, and Sterne set his face back to Fort Portal.

He was met at Butiti, one of the camps on the road, by a runner from Gallard.

“Come straight through,” the message said. “There is some trouble on the frontier and I hear Hardcastle has been murdered. I’ll be ahead of you two days, but I’ll wait for you on the edge of the forest.”

Chapter IX

“On Such a Night!”

Love burns, like this:
A little flickering flame,
A thing of passion, and a thing of shame!
And, in the end, a great, devouring fire
That lifts you to me on my heart’s desire.

Lithe of body, clear cut of face, hard and eager of eye, Dennison was a man who all his grown-up life had been a maker of situations, a passionate fancier of love affairs and women. It would be quite true to say that he took great joy in creating the situations, that he whipped his desires into passion and passion’s careless rapture. To be in love was, to him, to live, but he was far too clever, too level-headed for the love which he sought so diligently, which he fanned with such intense ardour, ever to have very much effect on his own life. He was like the moth, for ever singeing his wings at the flame of life, which is another name for love, yet always miraculously saving himself from fiery extinction.

Let it not be understood by this that he was a dilettante, that his life was as valueless as the empty-headed, weak-winged moth’s. Dennison had done much good work; he had the reputation for being a good sportsman, a very clever man and valuable in the service to which he had devoted his career. And he was very popular with men, which is not always the case with a man who is notorious as a woman-hunter. He was so good a comrade, had so great a fund of humour and cheerfulness, that men were inclined to overlook and forgive his weaknesses.

As for women, there never had been a woman who had understood Dennison, or for that matter really loved him. He frightened some, he amused others, he attracted all. He never knew a woman without making love to her, he had never met any who resented this attention on his part. It seemed so much a part of his being that they accepted it and were, unconsciously perhaps, flattered in the so doing. For every woman loves to be loved and most men are woefully inclined to forget this. Dennison never did. If a woman was old he would flatter her back to feel the pulse of youth in her veins; let her be ugly or plain, or dowdy or silly or dull, it made little difference. Dennison could stoop to conquer as easily as he could climb the ladder of self-confidence to snatch at the stars. The thrill of sex was always about him, leapt in his eyes, burnt in the touch of his fingers, in the homage of his tongue.

He was at least forty-two when he met Pauline on that first trip home to England. But he had the appearance of being much younger. He had just been on a shooting trip, six months’ leave from the exigent duties of the firm he served in England. He was browned and strengthened by his life in the wilds, and he was the keener for conquest, since for six months he had been cut away almost entirely from any woman of his own race. Dennison was unmarried, or rather he was a widower, for long, long ago he had buried the girl who had been rash enough to marry him at the outset of his career. Buried her, let it be said, fortunately before he had had the time or the opportunity to break her heart. For there was something much too pagan about Dennison’s love of life for it to have fitted in conformably with marriage. Doubtless, he would always have come back to his wife in the end, as indeed in his dreams he still did, but nothing could have tied him to her in the intervals; and to share a man’s love with many others, this breaks a woman’s heart.

Forty-two he was anyway, and Pauline nineteen, yet to have seen them after their first meeting you would have thought that boy and girl played together. The boy, perhaps, more irresponsible, more recklessly gay than the girl. For some shadow of all she had been through stayed with Pauline, and for those first few weeks she thought often of Robin and of the hidden meaning behind Robin’s good-bye.

There was a song Dennison used to sing to her in those days. He was the possessor of a warm, soft voice—not strong enough or loud enough to make himself heard on the concert platform, but infinitely seductive, every note ringing true and clear while he vamped his own accompaniments and turned sideways to keep his eyes on Pauline.

“We built dream castles in our talks,
We made our world of coloured chalks,
And took the rabbit out for walks,
Such fools we were, dear, you and I.
The world would never believe it true
Of me—or you.”

He was certainly a genius at building worlds with chalks or any other unsuitable ingredients. And at first he amused Pauline, brought the laughter to her eyes, made her forget. She wanted to forget; Hardcastle, that time in the forest; poor wild Satan. She was a little anxious to forget Robin too, or rather to forget that rather disturbing episode of Robin’s kiss. The memory made her oddly shy.

Dennison knew none of the people that she knew;... onboard. He did not trouble to know them. He had seen Pauline saying good-bye to Robin, he had watched Robin disappear down the gangway, and he had proceeded, with all the zest produced by six ‘ months’ abstinence, to “settle down to the role of situation creator. Pauline had first been conscious of his eyes, light blue keen eyes that stared and watched; not at all furtive in their glance, compelling, rather daring, yet with a certain flagrant homage in them that you.could not help but see. Then she found him Sitting next her “at table, and, after that, acquaintance ripened easily. He always saw her first when she came out on deck, he was always the last to whom she said good-night at night. The men said Dennison had appropriated, her and laughed. The women whispered among each other and watched Pauline with slightly’ envious eyes. Oh, but the heart of the most respectable of women is very hungry for love—many can show it only in envy and disapproval.

And then one day, quite by chance, Dennison heard Pauline’s story. He had not asked to hear it, he made no attempt to ferret it out. To do him justice, such things as pasts and futures counted not at all with him. The present was always his, he did his best to make it radiant. But that night when he heard her name mentioned in the smoking-room, he could not help but draw near.

“A rum story,” Fogarth of the Bank of India in Kampala was saying. “I know the girl’s father. An unsavoury stiff. Ill-treated his wife till she ran away, no one seems to know where or with whom. Then he waited till the girl was seventeen to go back and claim her from the nuns at Fort Portal. Started ill-treating her at once, took her into the Congo, beat her; I believe the skin, on her back was cut to ribbons. Sterne was on a safari in the district, the story goes. The girl, ran away from Hardcastle and stumbled into Sterne’s camp. Lived with him for about a fortnight and then he brought her into Fort Portal and married her. Couldn’t do much else, but they say Gallard practically forced him. Do you know Gallard, any of you? Awful stickler for etiquette in the administration.”

The other men laughed and Dennison moved away. Fogarth’s carelessly spoken words had roused such a storm of pity in him that he was really surprised at himself. But all night one sentence stood out across his brain and seemed to burn itself in. “The skin on her back was cut to ribbons.”

He was nearer to loving Pauline in the days that followed than he had ever been to loving any woman. And for the first time she was conscious of it. His eyes embarrassed her, his low pitched voice made her flush and quiver. She would not let him sing to her or sit beside her in the shadow of the upper deck, his hand touching her chair. In fact, she commenced here running away from him, and by her flight she fanned the flame of desire to higher, swifter growth. Acquiescence, Dennison had always found, extinguished it altogether.

They went ashore at Port Said with some of their fellow passengers, Fogarth and Mrs. Fogarth being of the party. There is not very much to do at Port Said, but it is a town that, for some reason or other, stirs all the wild instinctive impulses awake in the people of the West. It is a place of blazing, shifting colour, of strange scents and cosmopolitan crowds. East and West jostle each other in the streets, the painted, bedecked dancing girls stare down from their balconies and watch the white ladies and the discreetly veiled Mohammedan women passing each other on the pavements. And then when the sun sinks in a blaze of red and the full moon sweeps into a sky of purple and the town wakes to little twinkling lights, to strange music and soft sounds, Port Said is irresistible. The atmosphere of it steals into one’s veins like alcohol, the wildness of the East catches at one’s heart.

“On such a night as this . . .”

Dennison quoted that to Pauline as they rowed back to the ship after dinner. And as he quoted it his hand closed on one of hers and held it. And perhaps, because of the moonlight that flickered and gleamed on dancing waves, perhaps because of the influences that swayed out to them from the languorous, sensuous town, perhaps because she herself stood at the gate of love’s kingdom brought thither by Robin who had then, so it seemed, shut the door in her face; Pauline left her hand where it lay and leant a little towards his eagerness, so that her hair brushed his lips and his breath came warm and fast on her cheek.

“That little girl is playing with fire,” said Mrs. Fogarth, fat and sedate, yet oddly stirred with envy this evening, to her husband. “Do you think your story is true about Sterne just marrying her because he had to?”

“Probably not,” grunted Fogarth. “Very few stories, especially if they are spicy, are true when you get to the bottom of them. He’s damned well doing his best to lose her, though. Sending her off on a trip like this by herself.”

Fat Mrs. Fogarth sighed, feeling within her the faint pang which comes with middle age and the wise renouncing of romantic adventure.

Pauline stood a little undecided, the deck of the ship reached. Undoubtedly wisdom called for swift retreat in the wake of Mrs. Fogarth already placidly pursuing her way bedwards, her brief regret forgotten. But it is difficult to be wise when you are nineteen and sea and sky and stars seem to combine in a desire to lead you along the road of folly. And in that brief moment’s indecision Dennison was beside her.

“You aren’t going to slip off and shut yourself into a stuffy cabin, are you, Mrs. Sterne?” he said. “Come forward. I want to show you how the light of Port Said show like a necklace of stars.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “And, Pauline, I want you—you,” he urged so that the colour flamed in her cheeks and her lashes veiled her eyes.

Yet she went, perhaps not altogether willingly. A twinge of conscience came to spoil the adventure. Her hands, when he took them into his, felt cold; and he knew that she shivered as she stood within the circle of his arms. But he was wise, Dennison, with the wisdom of many successfully engineered situations behind him.

“I believe you are frightened,” he said. “Frightened of me, Pauline, and of my love. My dear, sooner than it should hurt you or bring trouble into your life, I’d jump over into that black, silver-edged water and swim away from you to death.

And at that he felt her hands tighten as he had meant they should.

“Pauline, little Pauline,” he went on, and his voice was the voice he sang to her with, “why be afraid of love? It is the most wonderful, the most beautiful thing in the world. Let me teach it to you, Pauline. Close your, eyes, lie warm against my heart, give me your lips to kiss. Pauline . . .”

So he kissed her, lips hot on hers, and she neither resisted nor drew back. Yet he was quite wise enough to know that there was no answering warmth in her acquiescence; whatever had swayed her it was not passion. So he held his own desire in check and presently, his hands very tender about her, he looked down at her and laughed.

“You are dutiful, Pauline,” he said. “Yet a man asks more than that, you know.”

Her eyes met his, he could see her face white in the moonlight, the shadow of doubt in her glance.

“Can anything make what we are doing right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Dennison, answered, and he laughed again, catching her to him. “I love you, that makes it right for my part. You love, me,” he hesitated a little, he realized his statement to be not quite true and she would appreciate truth, he knew; “at least, I hope to God you will one day,” he supplemented. “Love calls to love, Pauline, the whole world over, as wind to sea, as bee to clover.”

“But my husband?” said Pauline. “We have never spoken about Robin, you and I. But it doesn’t alter the fact of my being married, does it?”

“If he loved you,” said Dennison, a memory of what he had heard came to him. He was always careless of the weapons he used to gain his ends. “But does he love you? Why has he let you come home like this? Love doesn’t lead a man to do that Pauline.”

“You don’t know him,” she said. “You can’t judge.”

“I know more than you think, little girl,” he answered. “They told me your story, the other day in the smoking-room. It is all so plain to men. But the man must have been mad not to fall in love with you when he had the chance.”

“Will you tell me what they said?” Pauline asked. She moved a little away from him and leant against the rails of the ship. She was remembering a great many things as she stood there, but her mind was not arranging them in any order. “It would be fair to me to tell me, wouldn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he agreed, “Fair to you and to me, Pauline. For I love you and this other man——” he broke off and drew near her, staring down at her with his eager eyes. “Your father ill-treated you, they said; you ran away. It was to Sterne’s camp you came. You had hardly known him before, but you were alone with him there, sharing his tent, his life. For a fortnight, wasn’t it? Then he brought you back to the station and they made him realise—Gallard, wasn’t that the name of his boss?—that he had compromised you. He had to offer to marry you. My dear, no man could have done less. He must be lacking in manhood that he failed to fall in love with you.”

“They said that?” whispered Pauline. “He had to marry me?” Out of the tangle of her thoughts the memory of Sterne’s proposal stood out. “What could I say? He saw you in my tent. You must have been here all night.”

“Did he have to, since he did not love me?” she asked, and her eyes were very piteous in their appeal. Dennison ignored them. He had his own battle to fight. It had never occurred to him before that she loved Sterne. He knew it now, in those few broken words, and his longing flamed into sharp jealousy.

“Dear little girl,” he said, “how is one to explain things to you? You know so little, trust so much. You had lived with him for a fortnight. The world is ready to throw stones at you for that. The only way he could protect you was to give you his name. He was gentleman enough to do that. But I—ah, Pauline—I would give you so much more. My life, my soul, my honour. The touch of your lips is worth all the world to me.”

She was not looking at him, but out over the silver flecked sea to the dancing lights of the town. “And he could not give me all these things?” she said, her voice almost a sigh.

“One cannot order love,” said Dennison gravely. “It may be there is some other woman in his life. You are beautiful enough for any man to love, Pauline. One can only think that perhaps his heart was elsewhere when he met you.”

She turned to him impulsively. “And now,” she said, “what can we do? What can I do? I shall take a long time to die. Will he be tied to me for always?”

“Give yourself to me,” whispered Dennison, his voice was suddenly hoarse with real feeling. For the moment he wanted her more passionately than any other thing on earth. “That frees you, Pauline; frees him. He will give you your freedom when he sees you love someone else.”

“But I am a Catholic,” said Pauline. “I would not marry again, even if he—if he divorced me.”

He laughed, stooping towards her, both hands about her face. “Do I need marriage to tie me to you, Pauline?” he said. “My God! how much I have to teach you. Give yourself to me, Pauline, and learn.”

Chapter X

The Thing that Came on the Wind

Because of wrong done long ago,
To-night the wind blows fast!
Because of sin, and hate, that stooped
To murder at the last,
Death rides upon the wind to-night,
And calls your spirit to the fight.

A storm was banking up over the forest, heralding its coming by great gusts of wind, by growls of thunder. Battalions of clouds stood massed together, sombre black where they touched the horizon of trees, shading to pale grey where they met the dying sunlight. And away over the river the sun, setting in a flame of angry red, seemed to hurl defiance at the oncoming hurricane.

The forest was restless, a-shudder, with the wind; its great trees tossing, their branches creaking and straining against the storm. Only deep down in the thick undergrowth did the world seem immune from the wild spirit of restlessness that moved on the wings of the wind. Here strange things grew and throve in a dank stillness, no lighter for the sun, only a shade blacker for the night; and the great drops of rain that fell heavily enough to sweep aside the topmost branches, only succeeded in trickling down into this silence with a little hushed noise.

In one of the more open glades of the forest, yet still so sheltered as to be fairly indifferent to the storm, Hardcastle had pitched his camp for the time being. He was not a person much affected by atmosphere or surroundings, but for the first time in his memory the forest to-night was getting on his nerves. So vast it seemed, so full of quiet, creeping, watching death. The low grumbling of the distant storm kept him oddly restless, as if some danger threatened which he felt himself powerless to forestall.

He had now been for three weeks in the forest by himself with his small band of terror-held porters and Yosana, the chief hunter, who always accompanied him. And, so far, it had been three weeks of disaster and ill-luck. Two of the porters had died, Hardcastle himself had been down with a bad go of fever, not helped overmuch by a liberal course of neat whisky. They had seen no elephants, stumbled across no hidden hoard of ivory. Often, in drunken frenzy, Hardcastle had hurled imprecations at the memory of his daughter; attributing all his misfortunes to some malign influence which her spite had set in activity against him. In his more sober moments he would hope, very devoutly, that Pauline and Satan had received the fate which, in his opinion, they had undoubtedly earned. He hoped they were dead, he trusted that wild beasts, that the prowling, decay of the jungle had long ago accounted for them and for their white bones. It cannot be said that their spirits exactly haunted him, he had too little faith in anything for that, but there was no denying that of late his nights had been made restless, his, fevered dreams unpleasant, by some strange groping back of memory to Pauline the first. Mother and daughter; how he had hated them, still hated them for that matter; the more bitterly since he had so grievously wronged them, and since in each case they had seemingly escaped his hate and chosen in preference—death.

Of Satan he hardly, thought at all. His cruelty to Satan had never attained to the dignity of hate. He had been cruel for the joy of the lust of cruelty, that most bitter and depraved lust which comes to man alone. But Satan, except for the relaxation he afforded, had never counted in Hardcastle’s life. He had no instinctive dread of Satan which, curiously enough, had always lain behind his hate of the first Pauline. Twelve years ago he had found Satan on one of his periodical trips into the heart of the forest. There had been some unpleasantness with a wandering tribe of natives that had met the white man’s caravan as the former were attempting to conceal the ivory a six months’ hunt had procured for them.

There had been fighting of a sort, Hardcastle had used his rifles unmercifully, and the natives, surprised and alarmed, had put up little resistance, and there had been rapid, disorderly flight. They had left behind them ten dead men and one woman who carried slung on her back a small wide-eyed, rust coloured baby Hardcastle never knew why he did not then and there kill the baby. The woman, as he had told Pauline, had stabbed herself before his eyes, but the baby had crept out from behind her dead back and snarled and snapped at Hardcastle as any wild animal might have done. And that had amused him, perhaps. He had never been able to decide in his own mind what had prompted him. Anyway, he had picked the lusty fighting atom up and flung it at Yosana.

“Take him and feed him,” he had ordered. “We’ll bring him up to be one of us, Yosana.”

The cruelty had come afterwards. The lust had wakened as he had found the childish will opposed to his own. But he had never hated Satan; he had found the wild creature amusing even in its agony.

And now, to-night, for the first time in his knowledge of him, he found himself thinking of Satan. He pictured the boy crouching down among the thick undergrowth watching him with wide eyes. Pain had broken Satan, yet before he had learned the full bitterness of that lesson he had been very brave. Hardcastle could remember one or two outstanding episodes. The time when Satan as a boy of ten had turned and bitten the hand that held the whip, had made his teeth almost meet among the quivering muscles and not let go until a swift blow on his upturned eyes had knocked him unconscious. The boy had had strong teeth, strong fingers. Once Hardcastle had watched him strangle the life out of a young leopard that had leapt into the camp enclosure, made stupid by the glare from the fire. Strong hands! Why had he always taken the cruelty lying down? Oh, but pain is a hard master! Hardcastle nearly chuckled to himself as he thought of it. He had kept Satan in subjection through the power of pain.

A little tinkling sound came to him from somewhere in the direction of the porters’ huts, and Hardcastle turned swiftly on his heel with a curse of fury. He hated that sound, the shrill, persistent note of a native fiddle. It reminded him of Satan, and Satan had been dead for this last fortnight. What chance had he and the girl of life alone by themselves in this forest that crept and quivered and sighed with death?

“Yosana,” he shouted, “tell that blasted nigger to stop his music or I’ll have him skinned alive.”

Yosana, lean and old, yet still erect and keen of wrinkled face, came out towards him from the shadows.

“There is no one here who plays, Master,” he said. His eyes, as they looked beyond Hardcastle to the swift oncoming black of the storm, glinted with something uncommonly like fear. “We, too, have spoken about it among ourselves. The playing comes from there,” he waved his hands at the trees, “perhaps from the air! It is some spirit. The porters are afraid.”

“Yes, well I’ll teach them fear,” growled Hardcastle. “You know me better, Yosana, than to bring that kind of damned rot to me.”

“Yes, Master,” the man admitted, his eyes came back to Hardcastle’s face; there was almost accusation in them. “I speak only what I know to be true.”

The tinkling notes broke off on a sharp sound drowned by the roar of thunder that swept over the sky, and Hardcastle turned towards his tent. “The storm is here,” he said. “Call out the men to the tent ropes, Yosana; it is going to be heavier than I thought. To-morrow we’ll see what the whip will teach them.”

“Strange things ride on the wind in a storm like this, Master,” said Yosana. He looked again at the forest, a quick furtive look. “Shall I not watch in your tent to-night?”

“You will not, blast you!” Hardcastle answered. The man’s fear, a thing so unusual, so unknown, annoyed him the more because of his own unadmitted nerves.

“You go and watch the porters and find who is playing that blasted instrument. That is more to the point.”

They spoke to each other always in English, for Yosana had been with Hardcastle long before the white man had been able to speak any native language, and Yosana, Hardcastle held, was a better interpreter than any other native in the country.

The storm broke as Hardcastle reached his tent. It swept across the roof of the forest with the noise of rushing water, the trees swayed and bowed beneath it; the wind howled and shrieked, the lightning tore great rents of flame in a leaded sky.

He had seen many storms, but he did not remember one as violent, as vindictive as this. The tent seemed to quiver, straining at its ropes; the rain lashing down the sides with torrential fury. Hardcastle undressed and got into bed. The hurricane lamp, hanging from its hook on the centre pole,, swayed as the tent swayed, throwing fantastic shadows with its moving light. And he felt disinclined to sleep, restless, on edge.

Damn Yosana and his prognostications! What did he want to talk like that for? Strange things ride on the wind! Well, it certainly howled and hustled itself about enough. Strange things! Hardcastle blinked his eyes at the light and was conscious that he was listening very hard to hear something, to hear if there was something to hear above the roar of the storm. It came to him suddenly, in one of those strange lulls when the wind seemed to sink back exhausted with its effort and the clouds gathered themselves together for fresh rain. Very clear, very distinct, it came to him, the tinkling notes of a native fiddle.

Hardcastle sat bolt upright in his bed and bit back the roar of anger that had risen in his throat. It would be better to creep out of bed and catch the offender red-handed. Shoot him, that was the thing. Death was a mild but, at least, effective punishment for a practical joker of this kind. He reached out a hand first of all, though, to turn down the lamp—his long plump hand, that Pauline had so often watched stroking his knees, and shuddered as she watched! He would move in darkness, trusting to the lightning to show him his tormentor when he crept outside.

He was very thorough in his preparations. Anger had driven all thought of fear from his mind. He had his revolver in one hand, he took his long whip in the other. He might get one or two cuts in, if he was able to aim carefully so as not to kill. And all the time the tinkling sound went on; it danced before him as he crept to the tent opening, it seemed to call and mock and jeer at him.

Hardcastle moved the flap aside very cautiously and slipped outside. The player of the fiddle he judged to be about ten feet away to his right; and the storm was all about them again, lashing at his thinly clad figure, soaking him as he stood there staring and peering.

He must, it seemed, be going mad, for if strange things came on the wind as Yosana had said, and had often proved Yosana to be very wise, surely his wife’s voice was among them. He forgot the cause of his annoyance as he listened. “Don’t; don’t!” the wind wailed at him, as she had once cried. “Ah, you are hurting me. Don’t, don’t!” And then that strange sobbing noise that she had made as she had lain along the floor at his feet. That was just before the baby had been born. He remembered now, it was then that he had first begun to hate her. Because of the utter scorn that had lain behind the terror in her eyes.

“Don’t—ah, don’t!” the wind wailed, and suddenly changed its voice to one of swift derisive laughter, and the little shrill notes of the fiddle.

Hardcastle swung round on his heel and raised the revolver.

“Curse you!” he shouted. “Curse you all. Alive or dead. Do you think you can frighten me with your antics?”

And at that he fired, and as though his anger roused fresh fury in the storm, the thunder roared him an answer, the wind and the hurrying rain swept round him.

Somewhere in the forest a giant tree fell, torn from its roots, its falling bringing to the ground broken branches with a reverberating noise. Yosana said that it was that sound that brought him running out. He did not hear his master fire. But he was apprehensive of danger, afraid, why—he hardly knew. When he saw the tent in darkness he was suddenly certain that something was amiss, and he ran back to get his gun and rouse the porters. But they were averse to stirring; they were also afraid of Hardcastle and his whip. They would come if he summoned them, not otherwise.

Yosana went back to the tent alone. He was an old man and he had served Hardcastle for twenty years. He was faithful, and the yoke of service conquered fear. For, he never attempted to deny it, he was quite woefully afraid.

The storm had spent itself, the wind had swept it northwards, hurrying it to the hills. It was just pattering with soft rain. The trees stood dark and gloomy, whispering to each other of what they had seen and felt. Overhead the sky, swept clean, showed purple, sparkled with great stars.

Yosana crept into the tent and lit the lamp. His master was not there, the place was empty. He sat on his haunches, staring round him with terrified eyes. Yet why was he so afraid? The storm was finished, the wind had gone, taking with it the strange things it carried. Doubtless the master had gone out to see that all was safe.

Yosana stood up and clutching the lantern he staggered out into the open.

“Master,” he called, first softly, then on a shriek of fear. “Master, it is I, Yosana, that calls— Master!”

He got no answer, the circle of light showed him very little, yet just enough for him to follow the marks of bare feet stamped on the wet earth. With his nose to the scent, as a dog might have done, Yosana started to run, the lamp swaying in his hand.

Ten paces, perhaps twenty, he pulled up short, almost stumbling over the outstretched body. Hardcastle lay on his back, face upward to the stars, his hands still clenched on his revolver, though the whip lay across his face broken and twisted. Someone, something, had lashed him across that upturned face, the weal of red showed like a cut of blood across his cheeks and forehead. His eyes were wide open and staring with such utter terror stamped in them that for a second Yosana drew back and looked round him, all his own fear shaking his body.

Within the circle of light, though, there was nothing to see. The forest was very silent, very dark. Yosana stooped to his task. There was slight use calling the porters, his voice would not bring them, he knew. Hardcastle was a heavy man, it needed strength and vigour to lift him. Somehow or other Yosana managed it, and then, the lamp held in his teeth, its light swaying over that white face, those staring eyes, he staggered back to the tent.

Till morning came he sat beside his master facing the door of the tent, the lamp beside him, the rifle laid across his knees. Nothing stirred, not a sound came to him, and not for a moment did fear leave him. He was afraid, he said afterwards, as is a man who keeps guard against evil spirits. He was not a Christian, but he wished very much now that he had not always refused to be baptized. He would have liked to have held the talisman of the white man’s religion in his hand, the White Cross; others had often told him how it could save a man from all harm.

With the first light of morning he went out to call the porters. Not one of them could he find. The camp was deserted, they must have slipped away while he sat and watched. Yosana went back to the tent and, with the daylight giving him courage, he stooped to re-examine the body. Now he could see what it was that had killed Hardcastle. Round the white throat there were the marks of sharp fingers that had pressed and clung; the weal across his face had turned this morning to a line of vivid blue. He was a very repulsive corpse with such terror grinning from his face.

Yosana went but again and found the porters’ drum, a fair sized instrument made of buffalo hide. Under skilful hands, it is wonderful how these native drums will call out. They reverberate, disaster, rejoicing, war, and death. Yosana played it as though he hoped by its sound to gather assistance from the four quarters of the globe. He certainly did hope that the porters would hear it and come wandering back to see what was amiss. All his loyalty, the faithfulness of a dog, was in arms. It was not right that his master—a white man—should lie here dead and dishonoured. They must carry him back to his own kind, give him just burial.

So thought Yosana while his nervous old hands beat out the call of disastrous death on the drum, and, presently, from somewhere in the forest he got his answer, the quick, rapid throb of answering drums.

Yosana paused to listen. It was not quite what he had expected to hear. This was not the solitary sober note of a drum belonging to some caravan journeying, as they had been journeying, through the forest. The sound came to him from several drums. He could detect that they were the light, easily portable drums of war, and, as if to carry out this thought of his, he could hear, coming in the wake of the drums’ call, the sound of horns, the clamorous shouting of men, the shrill cries of a native army.

Whoever it might be, his drum had summoned them, he must face them; Yosana went back to the tent entrance and stood on guard, his rifle in his hand.

Chapter XI

The White Woman

Wrong stood between us with a flaming sword,
I find you here at last.
Wrong, and the bitterness of living Death;
Shall I forget the past?
All still you lie! Death touches the Divine,
God, now, must judge between your soul and mine.

“The Woman-King would see the dead white man?” repeated Yosana. He stood staring from the man who stood in front of him to the crowd of men who had surged out of the forest and stood now in a serried mass round some centre palanquin or hammock that they carried. They had come thus through the forest towards him, singing, shouting, beating their drums, blowing their horns, a horde of naked savages with blue monkey skins slung round their waists, and spears and knives in their hands. Then they had seen the white man’s tent and Yosana, with the rifle in his hand, and they had called a halt, one man being sent out from, their party to parley. He stood before Yosana now, a thin, little old man carrying about him certain unmistakable signs of civilization; the string of beads round his middle, the old brim of some crownless hat on his head. And he had spoken to Yosana in a language which the other had understood, showing that he, too, had once lived in the other world outside this forest kingdom.

“What is the matter?” he had asked. “What do you here? Why have you beaten the drum of disaster?”

“My master, a white man, has been murdered,” Yosana had answered. “He lies within.”

The old man had nodded and he had careered back to his companions and disappeared into their midst, from which he had returned with this strange message:

“The Woman-King would see the dead white man.”

“Woman-King, what mean you, brother?” Yosana asked finally.

The other raised wizened shoulders.

“Myself, I do not know,” he answered. “That she is a woman, they tell me, and that she is King over all these,” he waved to the crowd, “and over the forest, that I do know. Resistance is useless for you of the gun, for you may kill one or two, but in the end she will see the white man if she wishes to.”

“Why should I resist?” asked Yosana. “If aught is done wrong, if they or she or you know how my master died, justice will come when the other white men come here to ask and find out.”

The old man blinked at him with shrewd eyes. “Yea,” he admitted. “The justice of the white man. Even I know of that, brother. Now stand aside, veil your eyes, it is not permitted to look at the Woman-King; those who carry her are blind.”

He turned round and whistled twice on a little pipe he wore slung round his neck and at that the crowd of warriors parted and six men carrying the poles of a slung hammock on their heads moved out from among them. The two foremost bearers carried in their hands long white poles with which they tapped and felt the road their feet had to travel. They were blind, as the old man had said. Yosana blinked his own eyes first in seeing them, for all six men, strong and stalwart in the pride of savage youth, had had their eyes put out.

Yosana stood aside as he had been told, but he veiled his eyes much as the Peeping Tom of fable did.

The quaint cortege drew level with the tent, the groping sticks touched the tent ropes, the bearers cried aloud in some language Yosana did not understand, and the hammock swayed to a standstill.

A figure, draped in leopard skins and veiled by a covering of thin bark cloth, stepped out and disappeared into the tent. Yosana had no chance of seeing the watching crowd, even had he had the courage to disregard the old man’s warning. But his curiosity was not to be entirely thwarted; the woman’s figure reappeared at the tent door and slowly but unmistakably she beckoned to Yosana.

He went, eagerly enough, the old man nodding his head in acquiescence. Inside the tent, the light filtered, deadened and coloured by the green lining of the canvas. It threw an unpleasant shade across the dead man’s face, left the strange visitor’s figure almost in darkness. Yosana paused and bowed, his hands clasped over his rifle. Finally he knelt, there was something undoubtedly regal about this Woman-King’s presence.

So kneeling before her he peered up at her and saw vaguely a fine drawn face, a pair of dark eyes. And the woman was white, that brought Yosana’s heart to his mouth with a leap of surprise.

“Whence come you? “ she asked. She spoke in the native language of Toro, but a little stiffly as if the words were unfamiliar to her. “What name did he carry?”

“He was called by the English ‘Hardcastle,’” Yosana answered. “We, who knew him, called him ‘The Slayer.’”

“Yes,” the woman said. She threw back her head, Yosana thought that she shivered. “Hardcastle,” she repeated; and he noticed that she spoke the word as the white man said it, not as his own tongue had framed it.

“And how did he die?” she questioned further.

He told the story as he knew it, graphically, as his mind pictured it. He spoke of the storm and of how the wind cried with strange voices in its sound. He spoke of his own fear and his master’s anger; of how he had found him with terror stamped in his eyes and the whip broken across his face. To his poured-out story she listened, standing very erect, her eyes on the dead man’s face.

Only when Yosana finished speaking did she move, and then it was to throw the covering veil from off her hair and shoulders with a strange dramatic movement.

“He was a bad man,” she said, “he died as he had lived. It is finished.”

She moved to the door of the tent and Yosana scrambled to his feet to watch her. He was more than a little bewildered, some half-forgotten-memory was stirring in his mind. Where had he seen the woman before? Who was she? How did she come to be here?

A murmur of surprise greeted her appearance at the door of the tent, which quickly changed to a roar of anger.

“She has unveiled! unveiled!” the crowd shouted, though Yosana did not understand the words. “Now let it be war on those who come to disturb our peace!”

Yosana did not understand, but he was well enough versed in the sounds to know that he stood for the moment in grave danger. He took one look at the woman’s figure in the door, one glance at his dead master and then he decided that honour was satisfied. He had served faithfully to the end, he had beat the drum of disaster, it remained to save himself.

With the gun slung across his shoulders, Yosana got down on all fours and crept out at the rear of the tent, while the tumult of warriors swept down on the front and paused for a moment to gather round their queen.

That moment saved Yosana’s life. He was across the small space of open ground between the tent and the forest like a streak of lightning, and once among the trees he knew, he had as good a chance as anyone.

Indeed, they did not seem to look for him. He could crouch down among the undergrowth and watch proceedings. The wizened old man who had first interviewed him was evidently a person of some importance. He stood at the right hand of the queen, who was once more surrounded by her six blind bearers, and issued shrill directions. They fetched great armfuls of firewood and stacked them up against the tent, they lit a slow-burning fire, for the wood was wet and burned badly, throwing out great columns of ugly smoke. It was not a picturesque funeral pyre, yet it would doubtless be effective. Yosana stayed to watch just long enough to know that, then he turned and hurried away by a path that it needed shrewd hunter’s eyes to see.

He reckoned himself to be about three day’s march from the borders of the forest. It was along this road that Hardcastle’s safari was to have travelled on the following day. But whether it was because his master had misjudged their position in the first instance or whether Yosana, in his anxiety to keep clear of the blue monkey skin tribe, strayed off the path, the fact remains that it took him three weeks to win clear of the forest; and by that time it was an exhausted, half-starved old man that crept into the light of the sun and lay down to think what must be done next.

For one thing, the last few nights of his journey had been rendered desperate by the sound which had haunted his master the night he died. Yosana did not know if he was going mad or if the spirits of the wind had come back to haunt him for ever, angry with him because he had had the wish to interfere. Someone, something, kept pace with him through the day, watching with him at night, and it was the scraping of a little native fiddle that set all Yosana’s nerves tingling and caused him to be shaking as though with ague through the long hot nights.

He hoped, in the open country, to win free from it. He would make his way to the river when strength had come back to his limbs. There were habitations along the banks of the river, he would get food and companionship, and perhaps the thing that the wind of the storm had brought with it would leave him alone there, realizing that he was an old man, a servant, who had only done the things his master had ordered him to do.

Yosana went to sleep on that comforting thought, and it was there that Gallard and Sterne found him a little later.

Ten days earlier the porters, deserters from Hardcastle’s camp, bad straggled into Fort Portal and given their own version of the events in the forest. They had not run so far on that memorable morning that they had not seen the arrival of the blue monkey skin tribe. According to their story Hardcastle’s camp had been surrounded in the early hours of the morning,by a horde of warriors. They, the porters, had seen what was coming, and they had escaped, but the white man and Yosana, his head hunter, had been caught in the tent and they had been killed. One porter, more vividly imaginative than the others, could even swear to having seen them killed. It was an unusual event, for the few scattered tribes that frequented the forest were friendly enough, rarely resorting to violence against the white caravans, keeping for the most part strictly out of sight. Gallard felt pretty certain that Hardcastle had probably called down righteous vengeance on his head; and he felt no particular promptings towards retaliation. Still, for the sake of other hunters, for the prestige of the white Government, along whose borders the forest ran, he could not leave the murder of a white man unnoticed. Thence his message to Sterne and his own rapid safari to the scene of the affray.

Sterne had overtaken him just the day before; and they were waiting for the time being, camped on the forest edge, till the scouts whom they had dispatched into the interior returned with whatever information they were able to gather about a war-inclined tribe.

It was Gallard’s small dog “Smut” that first discovered Yosana, sniffing round the inert bundle of rags with little yelps of excitement, waking Yosana at last to a terrified realization of all his disordered dreams. With a harsh shout of terror, Yosana leapt to his feet, his rifle to his shoulder, and, without doubt, he would have fired at his imaginary pursuer had not Gallard called him to order with a very firm voice.

“Yosana!” shouted Gallard; the old hunter was too well known in the district to be unrecognizable even in his piteous state. “Yosana! It is Hard-castle’s hunter,” he added quickly to Sterne.

The two white men drew near and Yosana in a frenzy of delight threw aside his gun and knelt beating, his head in the dust at Gallard’s feet.

“Oh, Sir, Protector of the Province,” he babbled, “take me, shield me from the Thing that follows on the wind. I am old and tired, and if I have done evil it was to obey him who was my master.”

“Quite so,” agreed Gallard. He did not quite understand the trend of the old man’s remarks, but he gathered that Yosana wished to be forgiven for some, as yet unconfessed crime, in which Hardcastle had had a share.

“We were not looking for you to punish you, Yosana. But try and talk sensibly. Tell us what has happened to your master. We have heard strange tales.”

Yosana sat back on his knees and stared up at them. The last few days had turned his brain, perhaps; his eyes, Sterne, thought, were the eyes of a madman.

“My master beat him,” he said slowly, speaking as though in a trance. “Not once but many times. When my master’s arm dropped, tired with the whip, he would give it to me. ‘Go on, Yosana,’ he would say, ‘make the blood run.’ I had great skill with the whip, I could beat to within an inch of death. Yet sometimes even I was sickened as I did it. And then he must have died.” His eyes swept round as if he looked for something. “Listen, great Sir,” he whispered. He shuffled forward on his knees and clutched at Gallard’s trousers. “His spirit came on the wind. We all heard it. My master was angered. It came playing the fiddle he had played in life. What can one do against a spirit? Yet I would have watched with my master but he drove me away angrily. So death came to him when he was alone, and looked into his eyes and lashed him with his whip, and left him. And when the storm was over I found him and saw that he was dead.”

“I can’t make much sense out of all this,” said Gallard to Sterne. “Whistle up some of your men. We’ll have him carried into camp and fed and warmed. The poor old devil has been through a lot—he is half-dazed with fear and hunger.”

“Something has driven him mad,” said Sterne. “You can see that by his eyes.”

He turned and whistled and four eskaries came running out. Yosana had crouched back again on the ground, he was still muttering about the Thing that came on the wind as they carried him into camp.

However, over the fire in the evening, with a good feed of mitoki and hot coffee inside him, he could tell a more reasoned story. And to Gallard and Sterne he recounted how he had beaten on the drum when he had found the porters had deserted. He still held to it that Hardcastle had been killed by a spirit, but he could tell now of the crowd his drum had attracted, of the strange creature carried in her hammock by six blind men, of how she had questioned him, of how he had seen her face for a few minutes and knew it to be white.

Gallard sat forward with a sharp exclamation, the red surging to his face, and Sterne shrugged his shoulders, wondering why on earth his chief should place credence in the story of an obviously insane old man.

“She spoke as the other white people speak,” Yosana rambled on. “In these things I am not mistaken. She said my master’s name, when I had told it her, not as our lips name it, but as the sound comes when white people speak. ‘Hardcastle,’ she said, and then, ‘he was a bad man, he died as he lived. It is finished.’ I know not what she meant, Sir, but she went to the door and called her people and there came a great shouting and they rushed on the tent. I think they would have killed me had I not crept away.”

He broke off his story, his face suddenly strained, his brows wrinkled.

“What was that?” he said, quite sharply, as though speaking to equals. “Do you hear it too?”

Gallard and Sterne both listened. It was quite an ordinary sound to hear, round a camp fire at night. One of the eskaries, or perhaps one of the porters, playing a native fiddle. It had, however, quite a surprising effect on Yosana. He leapt to his feet, his face working with terror.

“The Thing that came on the wind,” he shrieked. “Even here it looks for me. It will not rest satisfied till I too am killed.”

He swung round and, before either of the white men could interfere he had leapt over the fire and plunged into the darkness on the other side. And at that Sterne, at least, thought that he heard the fiddling stop and an uncanny sound of derisive laughter take its place.

Chapter XII

Too Wise!

Poor wings, that came too near the candle flame!
Poor heart, that stooped to taste of Passion’s shame.

The mysteries of life opened out before Pauline very blatantly, very remorselessly in the days that followed her acceptance of Dennison’s guidance. It was not exactly the man’s fault. He was very passionately in love and passion had always coloured his life; that anyone should be ignorant of it was beyond his comprehension. And, for a woman, there is no half-way house of passion. When she gives herself in marriage, she knows either love, in which small word is contained all the glory of the world, or she knows shame.

Pauline, herself, was amazed and horror-stricken at the step she had taken. The calm magic of Dennison’s homage, the worship of his hands and eyes, seemed suddenly to be changed to a fierce possessive force that violated her sanctuaries. She had given herself, and never before had she realized the terror that might lie behind those words; Shamed and protesting, during the dark bewilderment of those early days, her soul groped to a knowledge of her love for Sterne, and with this knowledge flaming before her she had to face what she had made of life.

They landed together at Marseilles. It was Dennison’s idea. Pauline had told him that Sterne’s mother was supposed to be meeting her at Southampton and he was quick to see that such a meeting must be avoided. He was due himself in London at the end of a fortnight, but apart from that he felt it would be ideal to spend the early days of his honeymoon, for so he called it, at Nice. To Nice therefore they went, and the passengers on the Moldavia, noting their absence from dinner on the night the ship left Marseilles, nodded their heads and drew their own conclusions as to the end of the scandal which they had watched ripening in their midst.

Nice was in a whirl of gaiety. It was Carnival time. The place was crowded and roaring—rocking, one might say—with gaiety. The infection seized on Dennison. He whirled Pauline here and there, following always the maddest, noisiest throng. He pelted her with flowers, he ordered a carriage and drove beside her through flower-strewn streets; he bought fancy dresses and masks, and took her to the Bal Masque that carried on a riot late into the night. He drank quite sufficient champagne to make him very hilarious, passionately romantic. His kisses burnt and scared her, his hands forgot their homage and snatched roughly at what they desired. He woke the beast in himself and drowned any knowledge of having done so in the wild excitement that reigned all round.

It was ah extraordinary mistake for Dennison to have made. He would not wilfully have hurt a hair of Pauline’s head; he loved, for the moment, every inch of her fair young body, but he never looked to see the horror in her eyes or paused to wonder why she shrank from him.

At the fancy dress ball he left her for long periods by herself in the box he had taken for the evening, saying that he recognized old acquaintances in the throng below. Pauline could, see him dancing first with this woman, then with that. The dancers seemed to her all shameless, abandoned. She had never imagined such a riot of colour and noise and movement. It did not exhilarate her. The faces of the people passing underneath, staring up at her, leering up at her, frightened her, oppressed her with the sense of evil she had sometimes been so conscious of in that lonely house on the plantation. Once, Dennison brought one of the women back to the box with him. A lithe, eager faced girl, dressed in some miraculous fashion to represent a mermaid. Green silk tights, strings of seaweed and shells and a stuffed tail, which she flapped at the audience as she sat sideways on the edge of the box. She eyed Pauline with frank rivalry and made open love to Dennison, sliding her green clad body against his, touching him with her hands, challenging him with, her eyes. And Dennison was quite willing to respond. It was all glorious fun to him, to Pauline it was only another rivet in the chain of shame that tied her down.

That night, striking out blindly at the clouds that had gathered so quickly round her, she turned to face Dennison as he would have followed her into the bedroom of their rooms in the hotel.

“To-night,” she said, a little breathlessly, for she could find no words to express her thoughts, “that other woman. You don’t really love me, Gerald. What you want isn’t love, it makes me—ashamed, so horribly ashamed.”

He stared at her. She stood before him so surprisingly beautiful in her distress, her eyes clouded, the faint colour in her cheeks. A little twinge of remorse touched him, she seemed at the moment so much a child. But he was very far from understanding her.

“You aren’t jealous?” he asked, laughing a little. “My dear one, of a woman like that! I certainly never loved her.”

He moved towards her, and this time he did notice that she shrank away.

“What is the matter?” he asked, half angrily now. “Don’t be silly, Pauline. A man must be allowed a bit of a fling when he has been eight months in the wilds.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” she said piteously. “I suppose I am silly, but I didn’t know, I didn’t understand. And it is all horrible, horrible.”

She hid her face then, quickly, the tears shaking her, knowing that her poor stupid fight was lost, for a second his arms were round her, she could feel his hot wine-scented breath about her face as he kissed her.

“You silly little baby,” he whispered. “I was an idiot not to realize this kind of life would all be dreadful to your convent trained mind. We’ll go away to-morrow, little Pauline; we’ll find some quiet corner where we can live, ‘the world forgetting, by the world forgot.’ Is that it, Pauline?” He swung her off her feet against his heart, laughing, his lips buried in her hair; and, so holding her, he carried her across the threshold she had so piteously attempted to bar.

They left Nice the next day. He was very much in earnest now in his endeavours to please her. They would go straight over to England, he said. There was a little village on the Thames, Goring he told her its name was. He knew it very well. There were some dear old people who kept a cottage there, an old world cottage. “Oak beams, you know, Pauline, lattice-framed windows, and a garden all full of hollyhocks and mignonette and pansies. They are always game to let me have their best

bedroom. It’s got a bed in it that will make you laugh. We’ll go there, eh, Pauline? You’ll see England at its best and sweetest. God, I had forgotten it would be spring time on the Thames.

So he talked and petted her. He was suddenly uncomfortably awake to the fact that somewhere or another his wooing had gone astray and he was still enough in love to feel that it mattered. He had never before known a woman tire of him before he tired of her. That end to passion was bound to come sooner or later, but he liked it to come from his side, the severance tactfully and coolly planned. Therefore, he exerted himself somewhat to charm on their way across to England. He was once more very much the devout lover. But the spell had worn thin, his voice had no power to ease the hurt in her heart, his hands could not mend the damage they had done. Pauline was very quiet, very acquiescent. Dennison began to feel vaguely annoyed. He was bound to get bored if she went on like that. Did she want to lose him through boredom?, It put him in a false position, since boredom was not a good or seasonable excuse on which to desert a woman who had left her husband at your most pressing invitation.

Dennison hated being in a false position. He was one of those people wont to be charming provided affairs smiled on him, apt to retaliate very quickly upon anyone who in any way marred the sunshine or ease of his days. They arrived at Goring on a warm spring afternoon. The train deposited them at the little railway station and they walked along the dusty road, all bordered with hedges flaunting their pink may and climbing honeysuckle; they came to the bridge over the river and the small hotel that nestles down quite close to the water’s edge. There they had lunch in the dining-room that juts out almost over the river, and Dennison held forth on the joys of punting, on the lazy days they would spend floating down the river in some wide, flat-bottomed boat. He had still a long week-end before he need return to town, but already he was rather looking forward to Monday which was to bring him a definite excuse for going. He would leave Pauline in the little cottage that he knew of with the worthy old couple. A week or two of loneliness would make her realize the charm of his companionship. It was very peculiar of her, but she did not seem to be realizing it now.

He carried out his programme very thoroughly in the days that followed, and certainly fate seemed to lend him its friendly approval. Fine day followed fine day. The cottage garden was all gay with radiant flowers, the old couple as charming as ever, the river all that he had claimed. Pauline came nearer to happiness with him then than she had been since since their, ’board-ship days. There was a little piano in the quaint old-fashioned parlour. In the evenings, after their day spent punting and picnicking on the river, Pauline would sit curled up on the wide window seat, with the roses and honeysuckle outside in reach of her hand, and Dennison would sing to her as he had been used to sing, his fine voice low and tender, charged with all manner of subtle sweetness.

“There came a day, we grew too wise
To live and laugh ’neath summer skies.
I must be famous, you be wise,
With breaking heart I said adieu
To love and you.”

She came very near to loving him when he sang, and in his arms, with his kisses about her face, she would try and remember that. But she was not in love; in that, for her, lay the whole tragedy.

There was very little tragedy about it for Dennison. He went off on Monday cheerily, waving his hat to her with a fine flourish from the gate.

“I mayn’t get down next week-end, little girl,” he had explained. “I expect to find a pile of work waiting for me. You’ll not be disappointed if I can’t, will you? “

So that was his breaking heart in saying adieu! Perhaps, he had intended going back. It may be that new interests sprang upon him with unexpected suddenness. Some of his friends were very clamorous he should come away with them on a pleasure jaunt. A new feminine attraction swam across his horizon and all was forgotten in the passion of the chase. Not quite all. He still wrote Pauline; his excuses were very plausible; he sent her money with great regularity. He hoped she was not dull or lonely. He salved what he had of conscience by these means, these and the rather startling reflection that after all Pauline had never been really very passionately devoted. There were some women, he knew, devoid of passion. Pauline must be one of these. He could not really be expected to spend his days and nights with a rather solemn-minded prude.

Desertion never entered Pauline’s head. She was undoubtedly very ignorant of the ways of the world. In the quietness of the little cottage, in the perfume of the garden and the sweet warmth of the spring days, she was finding a rare consolation for her bruised heart and mind. Her memories of Africa were like the memories of a bad dream, growing fainter and fainter as the days slipped by. The shock of the knowledge which Dennison had forced upon her seemed mellowed and subdued in the kindlier memories of their picnics on the river, their strolls in butter-cup strewn meadows, their evenings in the sound-hushed room and his low thrilling voice. She thought sometimes of Robin and felt the tears sting in her heart, but they were not very bitter tears. She had given Robin back his freedom; the last few weeks had taught her how precious a gift that must be.

And, for the rest, there was something about this country life in England, with its faint sweet coloured trees and flowers, with its soft sunshine and lazy, slow moving river, that was wonderfully soul refreshing to one born and brought up in Africa. The old people in the cottage laughed at Pauline’s enthusiasm and grew very fond of her. She helped Mrs. Bartlett in the garden, fed the fowls with the old man, loved to run into the kitchen and see Mrs. Bartlett cook the dinners.

“The poor young thing, it’s not right the way he treats her,” the old people said to each other. Yet they were loyal, too, to Dennison, having known him for many years and having a great respect for the money he provided so regularly. They were not taken in by Pauline’s wedding ring or her name of Mrs. Dennison. “He’s not married to her,” summed up old Bartlett, wagging his head over his pipe. “The likes of him don’t marry and keep his wife in a place like this.”

So a month, two months, slipped past, and then one morning the post brought Pauline a fat envelope addressed as usual to Mrs. Dennison, but when she opened it there fell out on to her lap two letters addressed to Mrs. Sterne, and a slip of paper in Dennison’s handwriting.

“Dear Pauline,” he wrote, “I send on two letters, one from your mother-in-law, the other from your husband. The old lady has ferreted me out, I don’t know how, and has her nose down on the scent. At this stage of the proceedings, I do not particularly wish to figure in a divorce suit, especially as it can apparently lead to nothing. You have informed me that your religion will not permit you to marry again, and as to the other thing, you showed me very plainly in our short time together that your feeling for me was one of brief infatuation. If you had loved me, I would naturally have stuck to you through thick and thin; as it is, I would rather not appear in the affair at all. I should suggest, for your own sake, that you be discreet. Deny that anything has happened. Say that a whim, shyness perhaps, took you to live in the country instead of to your husband’s ancestral home. You had enough money with you to be able to do that for two months at least. Respectability, Pauline, is really the best roadway for you. On the other hand, if Sterne proves vindictive and carries things through, please realize that I shall always feel it my duty to give you the same allowance, as I have made for the last two months. The only thing I ask is that you will, if possible, keep my name out of any divorce proceedings. Believe me, Pauline, ever your friend,

“Gerald Dennison.”

In its way a cruel letter. Pauline sat quiet with it on her lap, her fingers touching the other two letters she yet scarcely had the courage to open. It was as though he had lifted his hand and hit her across the face. This, then, was what she had made of life. Oh, Mother Magdalene, Mother Magdalene, with your gentle teaching, that could, in no way lay these pitfalls open to the stumbling feet! “Love means self-sacrifice, so will you find happiness.” Had she not sacrificed herself? “Your feeling for me was one of brief infatuation.” Shame gathered about her as a cloak!

She stirred presently, for twice Mrs. Bartlett’s head had been thrust round the door, the old woman’s eyes troubled and anxious.

“He has thrown her aside, Donald,” she whispered to her husband in the kitchen. “There’ll be no rent for us this month. Not that I’m minding that. It is the look on the poor thing’s face I can’t abide to see.”

Slowly, very slowly, Pauline opened one of the other letters. Not the one with the African stamp.

She could not read that yet, she must find courage from somewhere before she heard what Robin had to say to her. Stiff, angular handwriting leapt before her eyes, written with a fine pen. The firm, tidy handwriting of forty years ago. No reader of handwriting could have told of the kindly loyal, soul behind the hand capable of penning such a handwriting.

“Dear daughter-in-law,” Mrs. Sterne’s thoughts moved stiffly as did her pen, yet she had had to write; it was as though she had known herself to be on the edge of fighting for something that her only son held very dear.

“It was a great disappointment to me to find that you had changed your mind and left the boat at Marseilles. I had everything ready to welcome you here. It is indeed still waiting for you~—the welcome, I mean. My son is very, very dear to me, and as he has given you his love I must tender mine. Write to me, my dear, and tell me that the hateful stories I have heard, the hurtful fears I cannot help but have, have no foundation, or give me your address and I will come and see you. I feel sure there is some perfectly simple solution for your absence which it will be a great relief to me to be able to write to my son.”

Poor Mrs. Sterne! It had been in no sort of way an easy letter for her to write, nor did it to any extent express her real feelings. But she was a very wise woman, with the wisdom that comes from love. Her son, as she had written to Pauline, was very, very dear to her. He was, in fact, the only thing in the world for which she lived. He had come to her late in life, she had been thirty when he had been born. All her married life, a life not too happy, she had prayed for a child and it had seemed children were to be denied to her. And then Robin had come. She had never, though this was twenty-five years ago, quite lost the thrill of wonder at his being. It was the passion for children, all the stored-up love in her heart, that had made her eager, glad to think of Robin’s marriage. His letters, telling her of it, explaining some of the tragic story, betraying even behind the boy’s shyness the love that had so strangely come to him, had filled her with no jealous fears of losing him, but rather with a delighted thought of adding more lives, to those that she might love. Her husband had died the year of Robin’s birth, the big house was empty and desolate, she had more than enough money for herself. People had often wondered why she had let Robin go to Africa, why she had not tied him down in some profession that would keep him close to her. But people who wondered that knew very little of Mrs. Sterne, or of the utter understanding that reigned between mother and son. That he should have written to her saying, “Mother, I am sending you my wife. Be very good to her, she needs it, and I love her,” showed a little the attitude there was between them.

Would she not be good to her! Her welcome, as she had said, had been very eagerly ready. That there had been no Pauline on the boat had brought first of all a bitter sense of disappointment.

“Mrs. Robin Sterne got off the boat at Marseilles,” the purser told her, his discreet eyes veiling the amusement he could not help feeling. “I am afraid I can’t give you any further information. Probably she intended coming across France to shorten the sea voyage. A great many of our passengers do that. In which case she should have been here a fortnight ago.”

Mrs. Sterne turned away and the curious eyes of Mrs. Fogarth, who had been waiting to speak to the purser, followed her elderly, yet still slim and erect figure, as it moved slowly down the deck.

“Did she say what her name was?” Mrs. Fogarth hastened to ask the purser.

“She introduced herself,” he agreed, his discreet amusement vented itself in a grin. “There you see Ma-in-law on the chase,” he added.

“Mrs. Sterne, senior,” Mrs. Fogarth murmured. She hastened to conclude her business and hurry out after the retreating figure. She was like a dog whose nose had suddenly become attracted by the smell of a good, juicy bone. Scandal supplied the flavour of Mrs. Fogarth’s otherwise flavourless middle age.

“Do excuse me,” she gasped, as she drew level with Mrs. Sterne. “But aren’t you Mrs. Sterne, Robin Sterne’s mother? I could not help overhearing in the purser’s cabin.”

Mrs. Sterne turned readily enough, her hand extended. Robin’s name, whoever pronounced it, was always music to her ears.

“Do you know my son?” she said. “How nice of you to stop me and tell me about him!”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly that,” stammered Mrs. Fogarth, “though, as a matter of fact, I have met him. But I—-I heard you asking for——”

“For my daughter-in-law,” said Mrs; Sterne; instinctively she was buckling on the armour of reserve against this woman. “ Yes. But I was not really very surprised. Robin warned me she might stay a week or two in France to break the change of climate.”

A wondrous lie, gravely told. Mrs. Fogarth looked sharply disappointed. “Oh, if you know——” she began. “I thought, it seemed to me at least, that some of your son’s friends ought to tell you, warn you. All the ship knows; She left with some other man. They went to Nice together. My husband knows him quite well. Dennison his name is, connected with that big motor firm, Dennison & Llaurilaid, and a man with a very bad reputation. . . .”

It was all out in a rush. Mrs. Sterne could not have stopped it had she wished. She felt, anyway, for the moment frozen; it was difficult to think or speak.

“Thank you,” she said presently, “Mrs. . . .” She hesitated over the name, and Mrs. Fogarth burst forth again.

“Fogarth: my husband’ is manager of the Bank at Kampala. Your son may have mentioned us. My husband really knows him, very well. That was why I felt that I ought to be the one. . . .”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Sterne again. “I am sure you have meant it for the best. But, my dear Mrs. Fogarth, you, must see I am not in the position to believe or listen to such stories except from my daughter-in-law herself. She will explain when we meet. And now you will forgive me if I go away. I see they are very busy here, it is really not fair of me to add to their already over full decks.”

With which she had beat a dignified, stiff retreat, yet the chill of what the woman had said remained.

She had waited a day or two, she had waited a couple of weeks. Robin’s first letters arrived, full of eager gratitude.

“She is with you by now, Mother, you won’t be able to help loving her. It means so much to me to know that she is with you in the old house. She’ll like the flowers, the garden. Teach her to forget, if you can, Mother; teach her a little to love me. I love her so much. I did not know love grew like this. I sent her away in case my love should frighten her. She wasn’t ready for it—you’ll understand that. The Reverend Mother said she’d been through so much, that I must remember to be very kind, very thoughtful. And man’s love, you know, Mother, is apt to be selfish. That is why I let her go to you. But in six months I hope to get home. It will be different then. I’ll start to make love to her as I would to any charming girl you had provided for my entertainment. Don’t you think that is a good idea, Mother? She’ll love me in time, won’t she? You know that poem of Browning’s you have always been so fond of—

‘God above
Is great to grant, as mighty to make,
And creates the love to reward the love:
I claim you still, for my own love’s sake!’

It will be like that, just you wait and see.”

Mrs. Sterne had waited another two weeks, her lips a little firmer set, dark shadows under her eyes. She could not send a cable to the boy and break his heart. She wrote very guardedly. “Pauline apparently changed her mind, is staying for a week or two in the South of France. One must not grudge her wanting to see the world a little.” Then at the end of a month she gathered her courage about her and called at the big motor works whose name Mrs. Fogarth had given her.

“Is it possible to see Mr. Dennison? I would not detain him for long.”

The pleasant faced youth in charge of the showroom was sympathetic.

“It is quite easy as a rule, madam, but Mr. Dennison is away for the moment. A fortnight’s yachting trip on Lord Blondell’s yacht. He’ll be back on Monday week.”

That was another fortnight wasted. Fortunately the mails to Africa were very few and far between, she did not have to write Robin every week. She wrote to Dennison finally, making an appointment and he replied in person. He had mapped out his line of conduct almost before he had read to the end of her short note, he deemed it expedient to act at once.

They met in the little private sitting-room Mrs. Sterne had engaged for herself in the Hotel Windsor. Dennison’s first impression was of a tall, slight woman, old certainly, but with some of the eagerness of youth still visible in her clear cut face. She had very blue eyes, he noticed. Dennison always looked first of all at a woman’s eyes, then at her mouth, then at her hands, to him the three most essential sites of beauty. Her steel grey hair was drawn back from a low forehead and twisted into a small knot at the back of her head. He admired her at once, respected her from the start of his conversation, and he was not at his ease with her. A sign that something in this interview jabbed at his not very easily pricked conscience.

However, he stuck firmly to his guns. “The name is familiar to me,” he said, bowing over Mrs. Sterne’s hand. “I travelled home with a most charming little lady, a Mrs. Robin Sterne. I am wondering if it is in connection with her. . . .”

Mrs. Sterne stopped him with a quick movement of her hand.

“You have come straight to the point,” she said. “For that I am grateful. It is not easy for me to do this thing, but for my son’s sake there are very few things I would not do. Mr. Dennison, my daughter-in-law was to have come to my home two months ago. From the time she left Mombasa I have heard nothing from her. My son is under the impression that she is with me, has been with me for the last two months. I—I have not cared to tell him the stories that have been told to me. I am waiting to find out the truth, if I can. Mr. Dennison, I believe you can tell it to me.”

It was a very direct thrust. She would, he realized, be very direct in all her dealings.

“My dear Mrs. Sterne,” he began, and in his very opening she distrusted him, “I cannot deny being very friendly with Mrs. Robin Sterne on board. She seemed to me to need friendship. She is, you know, very young, very ignorant of the world. And of friendship between man and woman the world, Mrs. Sterne, is always able to say nasty things, I accompanied your daughter-in-law across France, and I am aware of the fact that she—that it had been arranged for her to go to you, an arrangement which a certain very natural shyness prevented her carrying out.”

He paused and Mrs. Sterne’s steady eyes studied him with disconcerting gravity.

“Yes,” she agreed. “And you can, perhaps, give me my daughter-in-law’s present address.”

“Ah, that,” Dennison raised suggestive shoulders, “might seem like a breach of confidence to one who is my friend. Might I suggest, Mrs. Sterne, that you write a letter which, I promise, shall be forwarded to the right quarter.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Sterne, she would not stoop to any further argument or question. Never before had she felt so contemptuous towards any human being. “I will write and post the letter to you, Mr. Dennison. That, I think, is all that need be said between us.”

She hardly even bowed to him; he resented very much the look of scorn on her grave face. It very nearly made him turn round and shout:

“If you want to know the truth, take it. The girl has been my mistress for the last two months.” When you scratched the outer skin of Dennison you came to the animal very far removed from the gentleman he appeared to be.

However, he refrained, and to shout it was unnecessary. Mrs. Sterne knew the truth; his calm collected lying had not concealed it from her.

Only she herself knew the agony of those next few days while she fought out in advance the fight for Robin’s happiness. One thing emerged from among all the other thoughts. She must see the girl, she must judge for herself and Robin whether this love of his was worth rescuing from the dung heap to which it had sunk. Her own eyes would tell her more than any other witness could achieve.

So her letter to Pauline. It lay there in front of the girl, in the faint blue ink, its stiff upright characters. The reading of it loosened the floodgate of tears that ached in Pauline’s heart. All huddled up in her chair she cried and cried and cried, until kindly Mrs. Bartlett, a welter of emotional sympathy, came in and gathered her into ample arms, and hurried her upstairs and undressed her and slipped her into bed.

A cup of hot tea was Mrs. Bartlett’s remedy. She sat beside Pauline while the latter sipped it and all the time her big, work-coarsened hand patted and smoothed the girl’s hair.

“Don’t take things too hard, my pretty. Time cures broken hearts. There, there now, it’s amazing how much one forgets. How quickly the tears dry. There are lots of other fish in the sea, child. I thought my heart was broken when I married Donald, but I found it was still there to hurt when we buried our little one. There, there, don’t cry, don’t cry.”

Chapter XIII

The Hut on the Hill

A woman’s hair, and lips, and tear wet eyes!
A dream from out the past, a dream that flies!
Lo! catch it in your hands, the vision dies.

Letters, naturally, were very slow of reaching Robin. He was out with his Chief investigating into the circumstances of Hardcastle’s death, and their search had led them farther and into deeper waters than they had anticipated. Their mails, therefore, were not always very regular in being delivered. For one thing, Gallard had, to Sterne’s mind, evinced a most extraordinary interest in Yosana’s story. The tale of a white woman had obviously gripped his imagination. Once, Robin remembering the story Gallard had told him, had wondered whether the P.C. was not connecting this mysterious yarn with Hardcastle’s wife. But the idea struck him as too absurd, and he could only suppose that it was the spirit of adventure that had suddenly fired his sedate companion.

Certainly the story rang with the romantic sound hard to ignore. The belt of forest, on the edge of which they found themselves, spread down into territory as yet unexplored by white people. Indeed, according to Gallard, only one white man had been known to push his way through the thick jungle that shut off the plains that lay on the other side. And he had come back with strange tales of a yellow-skinned pygmy tribe, unlike the rest of the forest folk, in that their faces were almost beautiful, of a land abounding in wealth, in unexpected coal deposits, and gold in the trickling streams. No one had paid much attention to his tales, the great war had intervened and swept into its net all the hardy adventurers, the world wanderers, who would have followed a lure of this description, and, officially, the protected territory ended at this forest belt. It would have entailed too much expenditure, too much responsibility to have thrown the outposts farther in. Without doubt, in time, England or some other European power would push on into this unknown section of Africa, but at present it was virgin soil for adventurous feet.

Sterne had been able to bring both Yosana and Yosana’s tormentor before Gallard on the day following their finding of Yosana. For, leaping into the dark after the terrified native, Sterne had heard the mocking notes of the fiddle again, and following its sound, he had stumbled over Satan, crouched in a characteristic attitude, picking at the strings. A somewhat changed Satan, for he was now quite devoid of clothes and his sojourn in the forest had brought him to look more elfish and wild than ever. However, he was content to follow Sterne to one of the tents and he partook of the nourishment provided for him with infinite zest. He must have been half starved since his departure from Pauline, for the bones positively gleamed through his golden skin. Yosana crept in presently, a wild, dishevelled Yosana, who from his behaviour evidently mistook Satan for some sort of spirit until the mockery of the white men assured him of his mistake.

Gallard put off further questionings till the morning. It was late by then, and they all felt in the need of sleep. But before they turned in he drew Sterne’s attention to the elf-boy’s colour.

“Gold yellow, you see,” he said; “that was how Brailing described those pygmy folk of his. And he has not got a negro shaped face either—eh, Sterne?”

“Pauline always thought he was a half-caste,” Sterne explained, “but she told me that Hardcastle’s story was that he had taken the boy, after killing the mother, from a tribe of folk who attacked his safari coming through the forest. He had been with Hardcastle a matter of twelve years, and from Pauline’s account it was pretty ghastly the way Hardcastle treated him.”

“Yes,” Gallard nodded. “But I don’t believe he is a half-caste. Keep an eye on him, Sterne; we’ll get down to trying to extract the truth from Yosana to-morrow.”

So Sterne kept an eye on Satan, that is to say, he sat up blinking and nodding in his chair instead of going to bed, and Satan lay curled up like a cat in his blankets and slept the sleep of an animal after a heavy meal.

Satan, anyway, was easy enough to question. What he knew he told with a certain graphic descriptiveness.

He had killed Hardcastle. He had called him to come out of the tent, with his fiddle he had called, and the white man had come, and he, Satan, had leapt on him. He leapt on Yosana, just to illustrate the fact, much to the other’s dismay; and he had twisted his fingers round the white neck and pressed and pressed and pressed. The white, man’s tongue had lolled out so, he had sobbed and lain still, very still. It was quite easy to bring death like that—he had often tried. Why had he killed him? The gold eyes glinted with surprise. Why should they ask such a question? He was tired of being beaten, and his white sister had cried under, the lash.

There was nothing further to be got from him, he obviously did not remember anything beyond his years of ill-treatment under Hardcastle.

Yosana, questioned, showed much knowledge of a vague, rambling sort. Yes, he knew of the land beyond the forest. From those people came Satan. They were fierce and wild, they would kill whoever ventured into their land. But of the white woman he was this morning strangely reticent. Perhaps he had only dreamt it, the voices in the wind had made him afraid and stupid, and, lo, the voices in the wind proved only to be this evil lad with his accursed fiddle!

“Since he has killed my master, he should be hung,” was Yosana’s vindictive argument, and answer to all questions concerning Satan.

Gallard looked towards the forest and frowned.

Some strong cord of interest was pulling him to explore its depths, yet he felt in a way it would be time wasted, trouble thrown away.

“How long,” he asked, turning to Yosana, “would it take us to reach the borders of this country that you speak-of?”

“Five days,” said Yosana, “five days to the edge of the trees. Farther than that I have not been, neither could you go, Master, unless you took with you a great army.”

Gallard looked at Sterne. “Shall we give ourselves a fortnight, Sterne?” he asked. “Five days there, five days back, four days in which to stare out over the promised land:” he laughed, a rather forced sound. “I’m doubtless a damned fool, but something, someone, seems to be shrieking out to me from the forest.”

Sterne turned his eyes in the direction mentioned, and grim and dark the forest, its trees huddled together to make a gigantic whole, stretched out in front of them. It did not to his mind look very inviting, nor could he hear the mysterious unpleasant sound that Gallard spoke of. However, he answered cheerfully.

“I’m certainly quite game, sir. It will be interesting if nothing else.”

“It’s three weeks since Pauline left,” his thoughts ran. “In a day or two Mother will be meeting her.”

His thoughts touched more often on Pauline than on anything else in those days.

It did not take long to move their camp. They were travelling very light, with two or three boys and half a company of eskaries. Yosana and Satan went with them, the former to guide the part of the way he knew, the latter to be pushed across the border and left to his own people, as Gallard put it. Neither Sterne nor he felt any desire to hand Satan over to justice for Hardcastle’s murder. They felt that in Hardcastle’s case vengeance had, perhaps, been unpleasant, but certainly just.

The forest impressed Sterne, as it had done many others, with a sense of dismay. He felt that he moved along on their day’s march heavily weighted; the trees, their great shadows shutting out all sunshine from the ground, seemed to weigh on him. At night he slept badly, the forest kept him restless, he lay straining his ears for what he could not tell. There were noises in plenty to hear. Scramblings and rustlings in the undergrowth, the sudden startled, shriek of an animal caught and mauled, the purring growl of a stalking leopard. But it was not these animal sounds that his ear waited for; beyond them again his senses strained into the silence of the forest, waiting for some cry to break the heavy quiet. He did not know how Gallard felt about things. A curious spell had descended upon their intimacy. They walked together; over the small safari table, at their picnic meals, they spoke to each other vaguely, almost disjointedly; they sat smoking their pipes late over the camp fire at night. And Gallard would recognize the various noises that crept round them. “That is a leopard,” he would say: “that’s a wild pig. Those are monkeys frightened out of their sleep.” Sometimes they would talk of their life in Fort Portal, of the games they played, of who was best at tennis, of who played good golf. But of the forest they never spoke. Sterne did not know if it weighed on Gallard as it weighed on him. There were times when he thought he saw Gallard listening as he listened himself, but he always tried to cheer himself out of the idea. He never thought of asking Gallard or trying to express his own ridiculous feelings.

On the third day in, they, passed the burnt camp as Yosana had foretold they would pass it. The smoky fire, the damp wood, had done its work surprisingly well. There was very little left of Hardcastle’s tent. Nothing they could recognise as a man. The beasts had crept in to finish what the fire had begun. And, naturally, there was no trace of the fantastic, monkey-skin people that Yosana had described.

“I wonder if it was all a nightmare on the old man’s part?” Gallard was driven to remark. There was disappointment in his voice and watching him, Sterne could not help but be surprised at a man of Gallard’s calibre being so obviously impressed by a fantastic tale such as Yosana had spun. They were here, Sterne realized, because Gallard half hoped to find a woman whom he had once, a great many years ago, thought he loved. Only thought it; Sterne’s mind added half mockingly, for there was Mrs. Gallard since. He had a sudden vision of that correct, perfect lady, in her immaculate selfishness. Love could not change like that, pass from one woman to the other. If Pauline failed him, if she were taken from him, he could never love again. And then he remembered, suddenly, that this woman whom Gallard sought was primarily Pauline’s mother. The memory brought with it a little shiver of angry disgust. He did not like Pauline to be connected with this kind of gloom.

They went on, anyway, the next day deeper into the forest, walking single file along a path that twisted in and out among the trees with such amazing intricacy that it was impossible to think that Yosana could be leading them anywhere definitely.

On the fifth day, however, he brought them to the end of the trees and waved his hand out towards open country. An undulating plain; the outline of hills in the distance, the line of the forest hemming it round at the edge. There was a thin sparkle of river in front of them, the sun glinting on water and a rock-held slope that grew away from the water’s edge.

“This is the land of the yellow skinned small people,” said Yosana. “It is said they watch unseen from all sides, and if we go forward, to-morrow they will follow and kill.”

“Not very inviting,” agreed Gallard drily. “I don’t see any sign of humans, do you Sterne?”

“No,” Sterne assented. “I should have said at a glance that it was uninhabited.”

“Well, we’ll wait till nightfall,” decided Gallard. “If there are people here there will be smoke from the evening fires, twinkles of light when it grows dark. I’ve never known an African village or a hut not put up its bonfire against the dark.”

Sure enough, as the sun crept out of sight behind the forest and the moon swept up into a beautiful clear sky, in front of them beyond the rocks and the river, a fire leapt suddenly to life.

“Man,” said Gallard jubilantly. With definite adventure opening out before his feet he became almost a boy again, and Sterne was stirred by the same impulse. “We’ll go forward, eh, Sterne? We must have a look having come so far. We’ll send Satan ahead, he’ll not be such a shock to their nerves, being the same species. He shall take the flag of truce with him.”

“If one can trust him to do as he is told,” Sterne felt bound to demur. “We don’t want to run our heads into a noose, sir.”

“By jove, no,” agreed Gallard. “I don’t believe I ought to allow you to come.” He hesitated, and Sterne was quick to push his doubt aside.

“I’m coming,” he said. “We’ve got thirty men, all armed; the rifles ought to be enough to frighten the most warlike tribe.”

“It is about twelve miles away,” said Gallard, measuring the distant fire with his eyes. “Damn the moon, she is much too brilliant. We had better . wait till morning, a night attack which they see coming will only annoy them unnecessarily.”

It seemed sound advice, warmly seconded by Yosana, who indeed thought that any advance whatsoever would be hopelessly disastrous. They camped where they were, therefore, and watched the fire on the hill.

Over his pipe Gallard muttered about it. “ That fire is no ordinary thing,” he said. “See how it is spreading. They are burning the hill-side, Sterne, or else it’s the village, city, fortification, whatever you like, ablaze. See how it burns in a circle, it is about a quarter of a mile wide, eh? I wonder what it can be.”

The wonder seemed to make him restless. He could not sit still, rising and pacing in front of their tents, scattering the ashes of their own smouldering, purposely kept low fire with his feet as he turned again and again.

Sterne, drowsy with sleep, nodding in his chair, wished vaguely that his chief would give up this restless watch and decide to turn in. He was about to suggest it himself when Gallard’s figure drew level with him.

“Go to bed, Sterne,” the other said. “I don’t feel like sleep, and it might be as well for us to take it in turns to stay on guard to-night.”

“All right,” Sterne agreed, rising and yawning.

“You’ll wake me, won’t you, for my turn?”

“Yes, I’ll rout you out,” agreed Gallard. His eyes were still on the distant fire. Sterne thought that he had never seen the look of strained listening so intently marked on Gallard’s face before.

He slept, himself, quite peacefully, and did not stir till the other’s hand on his shoulder brought back consciousness. It was very early dawn, the plain slept, shrouded in thin veils of mist, the forest stirred and murmured under the breeze that comes with morning. And faint and rather frightened looking, the stars blinked in a sky turning from purple to blue. Sterne sat up.

“You didn’t keep your promise,” he remonstrated. “Your turn has lasted all night.”

“I did not feel like sleep,” Gallard answered. “The fire is still burning. I’ve had a look at it with my glasses. I’ve an idea that the people have set fire to their habitations and moved off. I think it will be quite safe to go forward. You are interested enough to come, Sterne?”

“Of course I am,” Sterne said. He scrambled from his bed. “Let’s start at once, sir. We should be there in four hours.”

It took them the full length of that time to get there. The country proved rough going, the river, when they got to it, a swift deep stream difficult to ford. Sterne sat on the edge of it and picked up handfuls of the shifting soil; looking for gold, he said, while the porters and the eskaries looked for a suitable ford.

But Gallard remained upright, staring at what they could see of the fire over the way. There had been no one to molest them on the way hither, there was no sign of life on the hill in front of them. Yet obviously the place round which the remnants of the fire still shivered and gleamed had been a big native settlement. There had been rings of huts, all circular and built in a circle round the centre large hut which the flames had not as yet touched. They must have housed, Sterne calculated, 200 natives. The slopes of the hill had been well cultivated, though here, also, it was evident some deliberately planned destruction had gone on. Not a blade of food had been left standing; not a field but had been trampled and torn up. It looked as though the inhabitants had worked in a fury to obliterate any trace of their existence. Yosana was not there to question, but the head eskarie gave it as his opinion that some plague or other must have swept down upon the natives and those who had not been killed had set fire to the place and fled.

Gallard listened with a set face. Since last night his mind seemed to be occupied with only one thought. To get there, to stand in the midst of those ruins, to penetrate into the still unburnt hut. He had no idea what he expected to find, he was driven by a force he made no attempt to understand.

He had his desire. Two hours later he and Sterne stood, knee deep in the rubbish of the burnt huts. There was very little left to show the personalities of the fled occupants. There was at least no sign of death, no charred bodies, no pungent smell. Both Gallard and Sterne thought they could detect signs of a higher civilization than that belonging to the ordinary native village, but they said nothing about it to each other. They were each afraid of the other’s mockery. They had come out to find mystery and adventure; it was difficult not to invent it.

They stood, anyway, alone among the ruins, the eskaries having elected to stay outside.

Gallard forced himself to speak indifferently, he was most strangely oppressed.

“There is one hut left,” he said. “Whatever there is to find we shall find in there, Sterne.”

“Yes,” the other nodded. “Come on, sir; so far our quest has been disappointed.”

They picked their way together over the refuse; The ashes were still smouldering, throwing up a vapour of heat against their faces. And the sun was blazing abroad by now. It was certainly very hot. Sterne paused, at the door of the hut and glanced at Gallard.

“You go in first,” he said half laughingly, the whole thing was beginning to assume the aspect of a tiresome jest. “It is up to you to make the discovery, sir.”

Without answering, Gallard went past into the hut, Sterne following. After the sunshine it was intensely dark in there, and the heat of the air seemed to gather itself into a thick cloud of some sort of unpleasant perfume. It was not exactly incense. Sterne’s mind fumbled with the thoughts which might clothe this scent with a name, and suddenly, with surprising vividness, it leapt to his mind. The place smelt of death, fetid, shut-in death.

Instinctively, he shrank back against the door, and then he heard Gallard’s voice.

“Just a minute, Sterne. Our eyes will get used to the light. There is something, someone in front of us.”

“And it’s dead,” said Sterne sharply. “Hadn’t we better get outside?”

Chapter XIV

The Shadow of Love’s Wings

For this! Dear God above!
This is the end of youth, of dreams, of Love!

What is that strange, swift influence that throbs between the living and the dead? A shiver from the shadow of love’s wings, upon which charlatans of all ages have founded their spiritualistic powers. For all would-be communications with the dead are, at their ultimate end, the groping of love’s hands that fain would feel the hands they miss.

Gallard had once loved a woman. There are many emotions, many sentimental stages in a man’s career which he is apt to designate, which he strives to beautify by the name of love. But, in reality, love comes only once to a man. Once, in a life time, his soul flames out and he loves a woman. Sometimes unknowingly. A face in a crowd, a woman’s laugh, and he passes on to build up his pretences round love’s name and to be unaware even of all that he has missed. And sometimes love sears and leaves him and he grows content with other things. Yet, be very certain, to the end that one woman holds his dreams.

So it had been with Gallard. Now as he stood in the semi-darkness of that hut, with the silence of death’s presence all around him, he was conscious of a leap of memory to the past. He heard a woman’s voice, he looked into clear, gold brown eyes, he felt the touch of small, warm hands. And then he knew what it was his spirit had been following so gropingly for the last few days, what it was that had drawn him so irresistibly forward. She was here, close to him, the woman that his soul had loved!

All this in a flash, and then knowledge passed and he stood peering into the shadows where they gathered in the corners of the hut. Sterne was outside, Gallard had felt more than seen the other man’s dive for the door. He was alone and he was glad to be alone. His eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, shapes were beginning to stand out. The light was filtering in everywhere, as it will through a thatched roof; it was only because they had stepped in from the brilliant glare that everything had seemed so dark.

He stood in a vast circular hut, larger than he ever remembered to have seen in all his knowledge of Africa. There was something almost regal in its proportions, in the great dim slope of its roof, in its shadowed space. There was no attempt at furniture, though when he looked down at the floor he could see it was covered with magnificent skins, lion mostly he judged them to be. And the walls of the hut, when he looked closer, were hung with rough monkey-skin-covered shields. In the centre of the hut, under the pointed height of the roof, was a raised litter, a bed, spread again with blue monkey skins, raised on a pile of wood. It was a funeral pyre, he thought, that waited for the flames. Waited, guarded, so it would appear, by six grim forms of death. For, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside it, two at the head, two at the feet, one on each side, were six men, their bodies propped against the wood, their heads lolled forward in a horrible imitation of sleep.

Gallard crept forward. He did not wait to call Sterne, he wanted to see this thing, for himself first.

The men were quite, naked, he could see where the blow that had killed them had gone home, the sharp gash of a long knife across their chests. Each dead hand held a long staff of wood painted white; Gallard remembered Yosana’s story and caught his breath. Then he went closer still, so close that one of the dead guardian’s heads brushed his knees, and he looked down at the woman who lay upon the bed.

Here, too, the cruel knives had been at work. The white cloth, for she was dressed in some long sweeping garment of white, under the white crossed hands was all gashed and red. There was agony on the white face, in the staring eyes. Her hair lay all about her like a cloud of silver. She was very old, Gallard realized, far older than her years, and she must have been very glad of death, though the pain had hurt her.

So she had lived here all these years, the woman whom he had loved, the English girl whom he remembered with red gold hair and frank brown eyes. Lived here, and died! God, how it hurt him to think of it. He put out his hands for a second and touched her face. It was very stiff and cold, she must have been dead for more than twenty-four hours, the blood under her heart had caked to a dry blackness.

With a cry that checked in his throat Gallard turned and stumbled out of the hut.

Sterne was waiting for him outside, eager to protest. “What in heaven’s name, made you stay in there so long, sir?” he asked. “The eskaries were probably right. It might be any old plague.”

Gallard winced;. Sterne thought he looked horribly ill and felt annoyed that his chief should have been so careless of the possible risk from those dead bodies.

“No,” said Gallard; he spoke slowly, stiffly. “I don’t think it was plague. The people in there had been killed with a knife.” He jerked his head up. “But they’ve been dead some time,” he said, “the fire stopped too soon. I think we should assist it to finish what remains.”

“Set fire to it, you mean?” asked Sterne. He eyed, the other man curiously. What had Gallard seen to so knock him off his balance? “You found nothing interesting then, nothing worth salving?”

“Nothing,” the other answered. “Pull up some of those smouldering beams, Sterne, set them against the thatch, it won’t take a minute to light.Come on, man, help me, and then we’ll get back. There is nothing here to keep us.”

He worked with the frenzy of a mad man, Sterne thought. He seemed wholly intent on finishing the work the flames had begun elsewhere. Not till the thatch itself caught fire and burst into a sudden crown of smoke was he satisfied, and then there still remained to drag Sterne away before he should see.

“Give me your arm, Sterne,” he said. “I feel sick—faint. Call up the eskaries, they can carry me. We ought to hurry, it won’t do to be caught on the plain.”

Sterne did not quite know what he was referring to, but he felt uneasy at Gallard’s evident collapse. However there was nothing to do but call up the eskaries and hurry back as the older man had ordered. They made a rough litter for Gallard and the eskaries carried him across the river. They landed him on the other side shaking and shivering in the grip of a bad go of fever.

“I’ll be all right by sunset,” he muttered to Sterne. “Get on with the march, that is the main thing.”

It was an unfortunate finish to their trip into the wilds of romance. Once or twice Sterne turned back to look at the flaming hut on the hill and wonder what mystery lay behind the burnt village, the murdered corpses that Gallard had seen. But Gallard never looked back. He lay huddled together on the uncomfortable litter with Sterne’s waterproof thrown across him, and it was as though he was endeavouring to hide his eyes from something, perhaps from the painful glare of the sun.

All that night he lay strangely quiet in the camp bed on which Sterne had deposited him, while Sterne mounted guard, but in the morning he described himself as being perfectly able to carry on. In fact he insisted. They had no more time to waste. And this morning he had no fever, he only looked about ten years older and was obviously dreadfully depressed. They turned their back, therefore, on the unknown land, the mystery haunted village, and once more with Yosana, jubilant at their safe return, to lead them, they filed off into the forest on their homeward way.

Satan went with them, they had found no people with whom to leave him, and he had developed an amazing affection for Gallard, he never left the sick man’s side.

For though Gallard might deny it he obviously was a sick man. There were times when Sterne came to wonder whether he would succeed in bringing his Chief alive out of the wood. A deadly lethargy seemed to enfold the older man, he moved and spoke and ate as though in a trance. Only once did he break through this calm and then Sterne was almost more horrified at the intensity of the storm that shook him.

It had been in reply to an attempt on Sterne’s part to find a subject that might interest Gallard. He felt it imperative to rouse the man if he could. In the stagnation of this underground world of forest and rotting vegetation, the stagnation of a man’s thoughts and feelings must, he felt, spell disaster.

“You remember Yosana’s story, sir?” said Sterne one night as the two men sat over their camp fire. “I’ve wondered once or twice since whether the woman he says he saw might not have been connected in your mind with Pauline’s mother.”

He could not see Gallard’s face, but he heard the sudden tenseness in the voice that answered him.

“Why should you have thought that?” said Gallard.

“You had told me about her, you know,” Sterne explained. “There had never been any news of her after she disappeared, had there? Yosana would have it that the woman was white. I thought——” he paused and leant forward to stir the fire into a blaze with his boot. “Oh, of course, it is absurd,” he said. “But suppose she had lived with that native, worked him up to a position of authority by her influence, become a queen herself. It’s romantic, eh?”

“Romantic!” Gallard’s voice rang very harsh. “Do you pause to think of the agony that might lie behind her life? A girl, an English girl, and life with those savages. How many years, five, ten, fourteen?” He leapt to his feet. “God! no, no,” he shouted to the forest. “She died those fourteen years ago. Haven’t I told you that she is dead?”

Sterne got up quickly to his feet and stared across at the other man. Things were suddenly most horribly plain to him. He realized, in a flash, the weight under which Gallard had been struggling.

“You saw her,” he said, “She was there in the hut. They had murdered her.”

Gallard swung round to him. “Fourteen years ago she died,” he re-asserted stubbornly. He came back and sat down, a flicker of flame from the fire showed his face white and set again. “There was a woman in the hut,” he admitted. “Yosana’s woman. She had been killed and her six blind guardians had been killed too, to watch over her in death as well as in life. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I admit, Sterne, that it upset me. One can suppose she lived their prisoner, died their victim. They were annoyed, perhaps, that she had unveiled to a stranger. It may even be that she wanted to escape from the seclusion in which they held her; that tallied with Yosana’s description, doesn’t it? And they caught her and killed her. But as to who she was, how should I know that? I did not see her face.”

“Well, but there must have been something about her, something outside their ordinary knowledge,” Sterne argued, “or where would the pomp come in? Didn’t you think yourself. . . .”

“Ah, for God’s sake,” Gallard interrupted, savagely, “leave the dead alone. Does it matter to you, does it to me? And as for the woman who died fourteen years ago, cannot you let her memory rest? She suffered enough while she lived.”

“She was Pauline’s mother,” said Sterne stiffly. He felt the other was being unreasonable, but there was something about this forest calculated to make the sanest man unwise. “I cannot help but be interested.”

“Let your interest stay content with pity then.” Gallard answered. “Be very sure her ghost won’t vex the happiness of you two.”

He never referred to the matter again, but with the forest behind them, their feet on the road to Fort Portal, he seemed to grow more normal, to recover something of his equable, dry pose. He could even chaff Sterne on his eagerness for letters and predict a dreary future for him if he allowed his wife so early in life to take the upper hand. Sterne was very relieved at his chief’s recovery, but he kept his own opinion as to what had passed. Arrival at Fort Portal, however, and his first batch of letters, brought him more than enough to think of, and woke him to a hard realization of what was in life that really mattered.

There were three letters from Pauline, and he opened, as it happened, the last one first, the letter written from Nice, stiff with the bewilderment of life which hail, so mercilessly, seized on her.

“Dear Robin,

“You will be surprised at my writing from here. I hope you won’t be angry or hurt. I want to do what I can to say ‘thank you’ for what you did for me. I can see now that you had to marry me and I am sorry I was stupid enough not to understand and to take advantage of your kindness.

“I hope what I have done will help to put things right. I have met someone who loves me and I am living with him here. Please divorce me as soon as possible. I will not do anything to prevent it, and I only wish I could give you your freedom in a less troublesome way. I have taken my own name again, I do not feel I can use yours.

“Yours,

“Pauline Hardcastle.”

Chapter XV

A Scented Web

The air, to-day, is full, it seems,
Of radiant life, and tinted dreams.
The sunshine dances in my eyes;
And hope grows brave beneath blue skies.
Ah love, on such a day as this,
Draw near, and claim me with a kiss.

There was one thing upon which Mrs. Sterne senior prided herself, and that was her judgment of character. She saw Pauline and she judged. It was not necessary for the girl to tell her stammered story. It had all been, Mrs. Sterne realized, a ghastly mistake, and she was quite wise enough to put a share of the blame where it was due, on Robin’s shoulders. Man is inclined to etherealize love, if he is the type that etherealizes anything; whereas woman can understand assault and capture where she will never be able to appreciate the devout lover.

That was the mistake Sterne had made. Having married the girl, he should have held her; he should not have left her to weigh and doubt and ponder upon the possibility of his not loving her since he was content to let her go.

All this Mrs. Sterne realized and she also knew that, the mistake having been so disastrously made, it remained not to repair but to condone it. And it was just there that the immense difficulty arose. For Robin, who should know it better than herself, was not of those who condone easily. He was idealistic, she had always been so proud of his ideals, and he was dogmatic and a little austere in his outlook on life. This thing would hit him very hard, and if he were hard hit, would it widen his outlook on life or would it turn him into the intolerant puritan she had always been just a little frightened of his becoming?

So that when Pauline knelt beside her, gold brown head buried in her lap and whispered: “Will he forgive me, Mrs. Sterne? Will he ever be able to forgive?” Mrs. Sterne felt it incumbent upon her to be silent. She stroked the gold brown head, though with a very tender hand.

“My dear,” she said at last, choosing her words very carefully, “forgiveness will come fast enough if only he can be brought to understand. That is the difficulty. It is amazing how little people understand each other in this world. Yet it is a very necessary element in love.”

She paused and looked across at Mrs. Bartlett’s gilt clock enshrined in a glass case adorning the mantelpiece, and thought of Robin’s stiff cable that had come that morning and lay folded up in her bag, “I know everything. It is all over. Am coming home.” It might mean so many things, but Mrs. Sterne was forced to admit it probably meant divorce.

“We will have to wait and see,” she went on presently, trying hard to be cheerful. “And, meanwhile, my dear, have you thought what you are going to do? Where you will go? I do not think you can stay on here. Until I hear definitely from my son, I cannot ask you to his house.”

Pauline raised startled, tear-wet eyes, and Mrs. Sterne bent forward and kissed her.

“That isn’t to say that my heart is shut to you, you poor thing,” she said softly. “Whatever happens; we are going to be friends, only . . .”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Pauline interrupted breathlessly. “You have been so wonderfully good, so kind. But don’t think I expected that.” She rose quickly, pressing her hands together. “And I can’t stay here either,” she said. “I can’t go on taking his money. I must go to London. I must get something to do.”

It had been Mrs. Bartlett’s suggestion. What did going to London, getting work to do, mean to ‘ Pauline, brought up as she had been, in a convent in Central Africa?

That thought sped through Mrs. Sterne’s mind as her eyes studied the girl. Young, beautiful--for undoubtedly the girl was beautiful—ignorant, easily swayed, as her last exploit showed, what was London and life on her own going to mean for her! If only men forgave as easily as women have learnt to do—Mrs. Sterne concluded her thoughts with a sigh.

“It isn’t very easy,” she said gently. “There are a good many pitfalls for young feet walking alone. You must let me think and see what I can do. Will you promise me to stay here for another week, let me keep in touch with you? I have friends up in town, one in particular, that I think might help.”

“If you think I should,” said Pauline. Her troubled eyes searched the other’s face. “You are so good to me,” she whispered. “How is it you don’t hate me for what I’ve done?”

“We’d be badly off if people hated us for our mistakes,” said Mrs. Sterne. She rose, shaking out the stiff silk of her skirts. “I hope, child,” she said, “that everything may come out all right. I hope so very much, for your sake, for mine and for Robin’s. He loved you very dearly. If he turns against love it will embitter his life. Yet, in a thing like this, no one has any right to interfere. He must do as he thinks right.”

“You say he loves me,” said Pauline. “If I knew that I don’t think I should be afraid. There is nothing he could do that I would not forgive.”

Mrs. Sterne looked down at the bag where Robin’s cable lay.

“You are a woman, my dear,” she answered; “Robin, very much a man. There never was anything feminine in his composition. It is not always easy for a man to forgive.”

That was the only comfort she had to leave with Pauline, and it was scant enough. With material help she proved more fortunate, though had she altogether realized the nature of the road she was opening out for Pauline’s feet, it is doubtful whether she would have been so ready to speed the girl along it. But in many things that had to do with life in the world, Mrs. Sterne, for all her common sense, was strangely ignorant.

Mrs. Clare Prueson, the friend whom Mrs. Sterne proposed to take into her confidence in regard to Pauline, was a woman with whom Mrs. Sterne had been very intimate in the early days of their married lives. Fate had, however, given them very different paths to tread, for whereas Mr. Sterne had advanced steadily and methodically along the highway of business and died leaving his wife and only child very well provided for, Mrs. Prueson’s husband had gambled on the Stock Exchange and died, early in the day, a bankrupt. It was in those days that Mrs. Sterne had learnt to admire her friend. Mrs. Prueson had faced misfortune with a defiantly brave face. She had always been an exceptionally clever woman, she was strong-willed and independent. She had been very handsome, with the bold beauty of Jewish blood; fine black eyes, a magnificent figure, black hair with the sheen of a bird’s wing on it. And it was obvious, as soon as she put her hand to it, that she had been cut out for business. Starting, in a very small way, selling hats and hand-made lingerie to those of her friends who were kind enough to buy, she had worked up for herself quite a big connection, and, of late years, had blossomed out into expensive premises in Bond Street under the name of Madame Pruenella. Of late, Mrs. Sterne had not seen very much of her. Her recollections of Madame Pruenella were those associated with a very small room on the top floor of a rickety old house in Lower Oxford Street. When she thought of Madame Pruenella, of the Clare Prueson that she had known, it was always to picture a stout, handsome figure, with eager eyes and indefatigable hands. The Madame Pruenella of Bond Street was almost a stranger to Mrs. Sterne, though she had once paid a visit to the exotically arrayed and furnished showroom; and at least twice a year Clare Prueson came down to spend the week-end at Lower Towers, the Sterne’s place in Kent.

She came on Mrs. Sterne’s urgent invitation the week-end after Mrs. Sterne’s visit to Pauline, and the two women greeted each other very cordially. The lamplight in Mrs. Sterne’s drawing-room was kind to the enamel that masked the hard lines round Madame Pruenella’s mouth. It showed her as a still handsome woman, years younger in appearance than Mrs. Sterne, with the blue-black sheen of her hair unmarred by any threads of white. She had plump, very carefully manicured hands, and a well modulated voice.

“You never change,” said Mrs. Sterne, with a little, held back sigh. “Really, Clare, you hardly look five years older than when we first knew each other, thirty, isn’t it, years ago?”

Madame Pruenella laughed. “Art steps in, my dear,” she said, “where nature fails. I can’t afford to grow old gracefully.”

“But you don’t grow old at all,” argued Mrs. Sterne. “That is the charge I bring against you. Sit down, pull your chair up close to the window. Isn’t it a lovely evening? I’ve got a favour to ask you, Clare, but I want you to tell me your news first.”

“A favour,” repeated Madame Pruenella. She leant back in the chair, her capable hands strangely quiet. “It isn’t often you do that, Grace. Whatever it is, I shall grant it. As to my news, well, things are flourishing. There’s heaps of money circulating, though the wrong people have it, I grant you. Trade depression hasn’t done much to kill my sale of absolutely unnecessary luxuries.”

“No,” said Mrs. Sterne, “I’m glad. You worked very hard, Clare, for your success.”

The other nodded. “Yes, I’ve worked hard. I was afraid the war would kill my profits, but it didn’t. Women still wanted crêpe de chine undergarments, though men died. I supply the class of people who fiddle while Rome burns—eh?”

“Oh, well,” said Mrs. Sterne, she was not inclined to be too strict, “youth remained youth, even through the war, didn’t it? And already, there is a new generation springing up that forgets all about the agony of those years.”

Madame Pruenella smiled drily. “I’m not complaining,” she said, “even if sometimes I do get a little sick of the type of person I pander to. Now, what about the favour, Grace? Let me get a good deed off my chest.”

“It’s a girl,” Mrs. Sterne spoke slowly, “I want to help. She, well she is in unfortunate circumstances, and she wants to get work. There is nothing she has been trained to do. She is very young, and she doesn’t know London at all. But she is clever with her needle; at least, I haven’t definitely asked her, but I feel sure she is. She was brought up in a convent. I thought. . . .”

Madame Pruenella interrupted with her rather hard laugh. “Young, brought up in a convent, and my establishment! Is she pretty?”

“She is beautiful,” said Mrs. Sterne simply. “At least, I think she is.”

“And you are a good judge,” said Madame Pruenella. She sat up straight in her chair and examined her manicured nails. “If she has a good figure, a pretty face, I could take her as a mannequin. But it is an indolent life, Grace. I want to be frank with you. It teaches the girls to love fine, soft clothes their ordinary salary won’t allow them to buy. And I am afraid I haven’t much time to waste over their morals.”

Mrs. Sterne hesitated, flushing a little. “This girl,” she explained, “has had her lesson, I fear me rather a bitter one. I don’t think what you speak of would be much attraction to her. And, anyway, I hope it mayn’t be for long. It is just so that she may earn a little money, enough to keep herself. I have a very special reason for wanting to help her, and my hands are tied. I cannot just have her here, or pay her money to live on.”

Madame Pruenella shot one of her keen business glances at her friend.

“The girl isn’t going to have a baby, is she?” she asked. “As a mannequin, that would hardly do.”

“Oh, no, no, heaven forbid!” Mrs. Sterne answered quickly, because of the sudden dismay which the thought brought her.

Again Madame Pruenella laughed. “She has learnt prudence then as well as wisdom. Ah, Grace dear, don’t be shocked. I always forget I am talking to you, and, when I remember, it takes me back thirty years, to the days when anything not quite nice brought a blush to our cheeks. I can’t blush now, the red and white are fixed. Anyway, send your protégée to me. I’ll do what I can. Two pounds a week to begin with, three pounds if her figure is worth it.”

“And can she live on two pounds a week?” asked Mrs. Sterne.

“Good lord, yes. Well, that is to say, when we say live we mean exist,” Madame Pruenella answered. “But, when we have just got over learning one of these little lessons that spell worldly misfortune, existence generally satisfies us for a bit. Tell her to call at Bond Street on Monday. I’ll get one of the other girls to fix her up with diggings.”

There, as far as Madame Pruenella was concerned, the matter ended, though she went off on Sunday night having made all sorts of promises to throw the mantle of her protection over the girl who was to be engaged by her as a mannequin.

As if anyone could protect girls if they were incapable of protecting themselves! What a dear old silly, life had moulded Grace Sterne into! If she was so interested in the girl, why didn’t she adopt her, or send her to a foundling home, instead of choosing the career of a mannequin for her?

“If she is plain enough to be safe,” was Madame Pruenella’s final thought on the subject, “she’ll have to go into the sewing-room, that’s all.”

Pauline got Mrs. Sterne’s letter, making the appointment and giving her the address, on Monday morning, and, with Mrs. Bartlett’s help, she succeeded in catching the early train up to town. She put on, at Mrs. Bartlett’s suggestion, her best frock, a dainty, soft coloured thing of brown, that Dennison had chosen for her in Paris. The hat that went with it had been of his selection too, its gold lace work and black net sitting like a crown on her soft hair. It was one of several very expensive costumes that Dennison and bought her, and it was not entirely suitable to the role which Mrs. Sterne had sketched out for her.

London, Pauline had seen for only one night, when Dennison had flashed her through the streets in a taxi, taken her to dinner at a large, crowded restaurant, on to a theatre, and home to their room at the hotel. Pauline had found it wonderful, breath shaking, even in that brief glimpse. To-day, the tumult of the traffic, the hurrying crowds, the gay, sun-flecked streets and houses, filled her with an exhilaration like the taking of wine might have produced. She was young, she was pretty, startlingly pretty. Her own image in the shop window glasses brought a thrill of pleasure. Every face that passed her carried its message of admiration and envy. It was difficult to remember the barrenness of despair. What place in the world is more wonderful, more throbbing with adventure than London, on a day when the glimpses of sky overhead are deep blue, when the sun shines, and the little shouting wind goes rollicking down,the streets, blowing the scent of country flowers and country fields into the shops and houses?

Pauline went on the top of a bus from Victoria to Bond Street. It was the way the policeman, smiling at her ardent ignorance of London, had told her to go. The horses and chariot on the Triumphal Arch brought her a thrill of joy; the sweep of Hyde Park, as they turned the corner, filled her with pleasure. It was all so beautiful, she thought, and with beauty round her it was impossible for Pauline to remain depressed. So that, on the whole, everything fitted in to make her appearance radiant when she at last arrived at Bond Street. True, a certain shyness took possession of her as the lift deposited her opposite large glass doors, veiled in artistic mauve curtains, ornamented with a small black plate upon which the name “Madame Pruenella—Hats & Lingerie” shone out with the glitter of gold. But that had something to do with the very obsequious attentions of the lift-man; Harry, as she afterwards learnt to call him, glassy of eye—one had been lost in the retreat from Mons—shiny of hair, had come to the conclusion that Pauline was a new and, to judge by her clothes, much to be appreciated customer for Madame Pruenella. Three years of life on the lift at Bond Street had made Harry very knowing about women and clothes. Was not the first floor occupied by a Beauty Specialist, the second by Madame Pruenella, the third by a Court Photographer? while the fourth was given over to the Studio and Madame Pruenella’s workrooms and mannequins. Harry had seen more lovely costumes, nightgowns and chemises not excluded, than could, ever fall to the lot of an ordinary young man. He had seen a great many lovely women, too; he knew a lady when he saw one. Therefore, he ushered Pauline out of the lift, and threw open the mauve draped doors with a certain flourish which, to the inmates of Madame Pruenella’s reception-room, betokened an arrival of some importance.

Two girls came forward as Pauline stood rather shyly in the doorway. Two girls, each beautiful, and of very different types, the one being dark and petite and vivacious, the other tall and fair and languid. It was on the tall one’s face that Pauline’s eyes lingered. She thought she had never seen anyone so absolutely perfect before, so beautifully modelled of chin and throat and lips, with such clear blue eyes, veiled by long lashes. The girls were dressed alike, in pale mauve draperies, they did not appear to Pauline to be dresses, and they were so contrived that every line and curve was free to show itself in all its beauty. They had apparently been resting on one of the soft-cushioned purple settees that stood about the exquisitely furnished room. The little dark girl held a bundle of silk underclothes in her arms. She was the first to speak to Pauline.

“Good morning, Madame,” she said, or rather lisped, with just the faintest touch of affectation. “Madame has an appointment? Or is there anything I can show Madame?”

Pauline drew back a little. After the sun-bathed, crowded streets, this room, with its purple and gold furniture, its curtained windows, seemed oppressive. The air was heavy with scent, a thing Pauline had always disliked.

“I was to call this morning to see Madame Pruenella,” she explained. “Yes, I suppose I have an appointment.”

The fair girl lifted heavy lashed eyes and stared at her, looking from Pauline to her companion and back again.

“It’s the new girl,” she said. There was the same mincing affectation in her voice. “Madame was speaking to me about her this morning. You are Miss Hardcastle, aren’t you? “

This to Pauline. The dark girl broke into pert laughter.

“Guess Harry’s made a mistake this time,” she said and drifted back to her settee, spreading the crêpe de chine garments round her and going on with her work of re-pricing them. “You take her in Daphne. Madame’s alone.”

She jerked her head towards a further mauve clad door and, without deigning to offer any other remark to Pauline, the fair girl turned and led the way.

“Miss Hardcastle to see you, Madame,” she said, pushing the door slightly open and nodding to Pauline to go in.

Madame Pruenella sat at a large office desk in the window of this small box-room. The contrast between it and the luxurious department through which Pauline had just passed was amazing. Here, everything breathed of business, from the stiff, green glass shaded electric light that swung over the writing table to the typewriter in the far corner of the room and the plain, studiously dressed girl who sat tapping away at it. Madame Pruenella was, perhaps, the only jarring note, though under the enamel her face was set in business-like lines. She was irreproachably dressed in a gown of soft trailing draperies, and her black hair was very imperiously waved and arranged. She turned sharp eyes on Pauline, and waved to the typist to stop.

“Just a minute please, Hunt. Go and see about those addresses I told you to look up.”

The girl gone, a little more graciousness crept into her voice.

“Come close to the window, please,” she said. “Do you mind taking your hat off, Miss Hardcastle? Ah, thank you. Mrs. Sterne has spoken to me about you. I really, practically, agreed to take you on before seeing you. Mrs. Sterne is a very old friend of mine. However, having seen you, I don’t regret it. That is wonderful coloured hair.” Her shrewd eyes travelled all over Pauline. “I want you to work in the showroom, you understand that?”

“I don’t quite,” stammered Pauline.

“The work will seem strange to you, dear,” Mrs. Sterne had written. “As far as I can understand, it is just to try on dresses. But it will not be very arduous, and I shall know that you are safe and not too unhappy.”

“But I could learn,” she went on. “I am quite ready to learn anything.”

Again Madame Prunella’s eyes travelled over what she knew to be a Paris frock, and her reflections were a little cynical.

“Ah, well, there isn’t much to learn,” she agreed. “You’ve got to look nice, and wear clothes well. You seem to have learnt that already. And—well, just be tactful. I think that is all.” She looked down at her papers again. “I pay two pounds a week to start with,” she said. “Mrs. Sterne tells me this is your first visit to London. You will be very ignorant of where to live, of how to husband your resources. Daphne—you will have seen her in the reception room as you came through—is willing to help you in these matters. Daphne,” she smiled drily, “is very knowledgeable. She has kept herself ever since she was fourteen; I believe that is six years ago.”

She touched a bell that stood on her table, it gave out a little sharp sound and the door into the reception-room swung open again. The tall, fair girl stood in the doorway, the lazy lashes just lifted from off her eyes.

“Daphne,” said Madame Pruenella, “take Miss Hardcastle—by the way, your name is Pauline, isn’t it?. we don’t ‘Miss’ each other in this establishment—take Pauline up to the workrooms. Tell Blatch I want her to be turned out all in black. I think that will be better than mauve with that brown-gold hair! She is to help in the reception-room, you know that. Oh, and Daphne, you’ve remembered about the room, eh?”

“Yes,” said the fair girl. “There’s a room she can have in the house I lodge at, if she likes.”

Madame Pruenella nodded. “That’s right, settle it up with her, there’s a good girl. Tell Blatch the dress must be ready by Wednesday, that is the day after to-morrow.” She flashed a glance at Pauline. “You will be ready to start work on Wednesday, eh?”

“Thank you,” said Pauline. She did not quite know what else to say. She had a strange fancy that, a net—oh, a fine mauve and gold, heavily scented affair, but none the less a net—had closed down on her. It was shutting outside some of the gaiety with which London had started her day.

Chapter XVI

Memories!

What power dreams have to hurt!
Across night’s skies,
I see the passion in your eyes;
The love that turns to sullen, harsh surprise!
What power dreams have—to hurt.

Daphne—Miss Morris, her landlady called her—lived in a drab-looking house, in a still drabber-looking square of houses, that opened off the King’s Road, Chelsea. The room, that she had languidly said would be placed at Pauline’s disposal, proved to be an attic in the aforesaid house, the slanting window of which let out upon the sky. That was its one advantage. If the sky were blue, you got the full benefit of its blueness; and even grey, hurrying clouds were more beautiful to look at than the drab houses opposite, or the variegated sordidness of King’s Road. Anyway, for fifteen shillings a week one could not be too particular, as Daphne said.

She herself occupied the attic on the opposite landing. When both doors were open, Pauline could get a glimpse of Daphne’s dressing table, so oddly symbolical of the girl herself. For there were yesterday’s flowers thrown down among a medley of powder puffs and rouge boxes and lip salve sticks; and there would always be the photo of some man; sometimes a young one, sometimes an old one, stuck, cornerwise, in Daphne’s looking glass.

“My boy,” she would call the original of the favoured occupant. When you got beyond the mincing affectation of the reception-room Daphne was very common. A common little narrow soul clothed in a beautiful body, decked out and kept perfect, manicured, and dressed and taught by Madame Pruenella. Yet she had looked after herself; for six years, shrewd common sense as well as beauty went to her make-up. She would sell herself to the highest bidder, as she already sold her kisses, her favours, when it came to selling.

Nevertheless, behind and beyond it all Daphne was not at all bad hearted. She watched Pauline being initiated into life in Madame Pruenella’s establishment, saw her struggling with the rather grim poverty of Whitehead Square, and her eyes were friendly, if languid. Her sympathy expressed itself in the sharing of boxes of sweets, won from her various admirers; in the thrusting of half-faded flowers into Pauline’s attic; in the shielding of Pauline, by her own blank disregard, from the tauntings of Henrietta, the dark girl.

Henrietta had no use for Pauline, and said so firmly. What was more, she wished to say so in the company of the regal Daphne, for it was an understood thing that Daphne ruled, by right of her beauty, among Madame Pruenella’s assistants. And, as a rule, Daphne was easy enough to lead, especially by the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued Henrietta. Only in the matter of baiting Pauline Daphne chose to stand aloof. She let it be known that she had extended her friendship to Pauline. In the workrooms that was sufficient. It was only in the reception-room that Henrietta could carry on single-handed her feud of spite.

There were about a dozen workers in the workroom under Miss Blatch. They were all very much the same, with pale faces, stunted figures, deft hands. Beauty was not necessary for the workroom. The three girls reserved for the reception-room would move in and out of this drab throng and seem like butterflies among innumerable chrysalises. Yet the work girls had their standard of superiority. They were not on show like Daphne and Pauline and Henrietta. What they had of good looks was their own, not let out for hire. Miss Blatch was in the habit of putting this side of the question very bluntly. She was a grim spinster of uncertain age, with a stiff, angular figure, fastened into stays of a bygone fashion. But she was the cleverest designer Madame Pruenella employed, and, as such, was allowed her bitter say on most matters.

“Another of you,” she grumbled, fitting on Pauline’s black draperies, that Wednesday morning. “It’s to be black is it, to match your brown-gold hair? You’d be better to cut it off or dye it in ink than let it lead you along the path Madame maps out for you.”

Pauline looked a little dismayed and Daphne laughed, languidly.

“Come on, old Blatchy,” she drawled. “We travel our own roads. Madame doesn’t choose them for us.”

“Yes, and where will they lead you?” snorted Miss Blatch. “To the market where souls are sold as well as bodies. There now,” she swung Pauline round. “Madame can’t but say that it suits you.”

“She looks a dream,” agreed Daphne. “Don’t be so cross, Blatchy. Wish her joy and a nice rich boy.”

“Wishes of mine won’t bring them,” Blatch answered. “Flies know where the honey is spread. She’s dressed up to attract men; I expect she’ll succeed. I certainly wish her joy of them. Much good they’ve done you, Daphne. You were a good enough girl when you first came to us.”

“I’m still good in patches,” laughed Daphne, and escorted Pauline back to the reception-room, chuckling over the encounter. “Blatchy’s mad,” she confided. “If you are pretty, it’s the mark of the beast. Poor old Blatchy, she doesn’t often get tempted to be anything but good.”

There were many temptations for Daphne, she was quite open about them. The luxury of life in the reception-room at Bond Street, the touch of fine, soft clothes, the jewels to beautify her beauty with, the soaps, the scents, the powders into which Madame Pruenella had initiated her, the necessity for these things had eaten into her soul. And the only way you could get them was by selling your beauty to man. Daphne would begin her career, apart from Madame Pruenella’s, as the mistress of some man, rich enough, old enough, to pay her price; she would end it——! One needs brave eyes to look to the end of such lives as Daphne’s! Daphne herself never looked, her lazy lidded eyes saw nothing beyond the reflection of her own beauty in the glass. Madame Pruenella thought of it sometimes with half cynical pity; Pauline came to realize it with shuddering horror. For the streets of London are filled with women who start life as Daphne had started it, and their faces certainly bring horror to the hearts of happier lives.

Plunged into the midst of the strange exotic set that ebbed and flowed into the reception-room of Madame Pruenella; surrounded by an atmosphere in which the beauty of the body was worshipped as the only thing worth having; her days spent in parading soft carpeted floors in garments, the rare richness of which only served to set off her own rare beauty; her evenings passed in the drab loneliness of an attic in Whitehead Square: thus it was that Pauline entered upon the third stage of her existence. It was, in reality, a bewildering phase, but all her life, as she paused to look back on it, seemed to have been full of amazement, too often wet with tears. She saw herself again the child that the nuns had loved to call “Pippa,” laughing and rioting about the long, cool brick building, or rushing out into the sun-laden gardens. She saw the great forest-decked hills that climbed away and away from the convent gate till they reached the snows. Sometimes, in her attic in the evenings, she would open the window and sit watching the smoke from the chimneys opposite drifting like clouds across the sky. And she would think and remember, pull out, first this picture, and then that, from the past. She had so little else to do. The present, the way she spent her days, hurt some secret shyness in her soul. She could not bear to think of herself as she posed and pirouetted to Madame Pruenella’s orders. And so, in the evenings she would drive her mind back to the past, even though she winced away from the pain of some of the memories. Sometimes, a picture of the forest would hold her. She would see the great trees, the dark shadows, Satan’s peering face and elf-like form. She would not often let herself think of her father. She had heard of his death, and, somehow, hate seemed to end there. Robin’s face always would slip between that memory and her. And then she would come back on that safari, as they had come, and the scent of the tuberoses would blow against her face, and she would remember how Robin had kissed her!

Love! Had that been love? She had learned so much since then, travelled the road of knowledge which turns a girl into a woman. Dennison’s face would sweep up in front of her. “Give yourself to me, Pauline, and learn?” His voice would mock her from among the other strident noises of King’s Road.

“But all on which I set such store,
I’d give back now for evermore,
If I could only know once more,
Those happy hours my heart lived through,
With love, and you!”

Ah, but that had not been love! Every shamed nerve in her body trembled away from the thought. If she could only blot him out of her life! If she could throw away the memories he had left, as she had given away the things with which he had surrounded her! She had left them all at Mrs. Bartlett’s. She had brought to London only the things the nuns had made for her, the nuns and Mrs. Thomas. And on that thought back her memories would swing to the little chapel, the scent of flowers, Robin’s figure kneeling beside her at the altar rails. “Love means self-sacrifice,” “Oh, Mother Magdalene Mother Magdalene, help me to find my way back! Pray for me, for I need your prayers!”

There would come the sound of light, lazy laughter on the stairs, Daphne’s voice.

“No, you can’t come in. Not to-night. Run away, there’s a good boy. Someday! Yes, perhaps!”

She was so shameless in her bargaining, Daphne, she did not mind who heard.

She would look in at Pauline’s room. She had grown used to seeing the small head, the tragically huddled together figure, against the skylight.

“Not in bed yet?” she would say. “My, how you waste yourself. Might as well have come with me.”

Daphne was very generous in her offers to share amusements. She would have dragged Pauline to every dance, every supper party, every theatre, to which she herself was taken. Only Pauline would not go. There she drew the line. All day she played a part, there seemed nothing else for her to do. She must work, and she must wait. For Robin’s coming, for his forgiveness! Sometimes, leaving the past with all its memories, her mind would leap ahead and picture Robin’s coming, the shelter of his arms that had forgiven! How could Daphne know or understand? Wasting herself, as Daphne said.

And certainly, viewed from the standpoint of youth, it is a case of wasting oneself to live on two pounds a week in London. Fifteen shillings went on Pauline’s rent, which included breakfast. There remained lunch, tea and dinner, laundry, fares and clothes to come out of what was left. On most days the girls lunched in the workroom, Harry being dispatched to fetch them meat rolls and a bottle of milk. Daphne would often go out to lunch.

“Private car this time,” Harry, would confide to the others. “Lord, she’s going it! Come to no good, Daphne! You wait and see.”

For Harry, with his glassy eye and well oiled hair, shared a great many of Miss Blatch’s views on life. Henrietta sometimes went out, and if she did was insufferable in the workroom for the next few days.

Tea Madame Pruenella supplied in the reception-room to whoever of her clients happened to be present. Among a certain set it had become a well known rendezvous, the gentlemen calling to meet the ladies of their choice, or to spend a lazy half-hour criticizing the beauty of the dresses and the mannequins. That was the time in the day which Pauline hated most, though to Daphne it came as the welcome moment in a day of boredom.

“Pauline, please. That green charmeuse tea gown for Mrs. Clanarty to see, and slip on that new chemise camisole underneath. Daphne, those hand-worked pyjamas; that lace cap from Paris.”

So Madame Pruenella would issue her orders and Miss Blatch, with grim face and sarcastic smiles, would get the girls ready in the little dressing-room that adjoined the reception-room.

“You must stand like this,” she would say. “That shows the line of the bust. I must say, you are not so keen on showing off as Daphne is. You’ve got to try and do the things credit though; that line took me a day’s work to get.”

Yes, she had to do the things credit. Pauline would try and fix her mind on that, ignoring the men’s eyes that appraised and criticized, admired or showed cynically bored. They spoke of Daphne and Henrietta and herself as though they were lay figures; the women and the men would discuss their good or bad points between them. And her beauty brought her admiration. The road was open to her feet as it had been to Daphne’s. Harry would come back from taking some of the visitors down in the lift, and he would hand Pauline a letter or a card, a bunch of flowers, or a box of sweets. He always smiled when he did this, a kind of malicious grin. Perhaps he imagined himself as the Mephistopheles of the plot.

It was quite easy for Pauline to tear the letter up unread, to give the card back, to hand the chocolates and the flowers over to the workroom. The thing had as yet, no temptation for her. Was she not waiting? Waiting for Robin’s forgiveness and his love.

But her evenings were dreary. The walk, or the bus ride, home to Chelsea, supper at a cheap Italian restaurant in King’s Road: the attic with its skylight, its memories of the past, its dreams of the future.

“And every day you get a little older,” Daphne argued. “You are silly. What fun do you get out of life?”

Not much fun, Pauline was bound to agree. Only the satisfaction of knowing that she was perhaps wiping out her past mistake; only her rosy-tinted hopes of what was to come.

These received a rude awakening one day, about two months after her reception into Madame Pruenella’s. It had been a day, anyway, full of trials for Pauline. Madame Pruenella had been difficult to please; Henrietta in one of her most carping moods. And, of late, one man amongst Madame Pruenella’s clientele for afternoon teas had begun to assume terrifying proportions in Pauline’s eyes. He was of the persistent type, who seek to terrify into submission where they cannot win by wooing. A large, broad shouldered man, fair of hair, sombre of eyes. He had selected Pauline for his attentions on his first visit to the reception-room a fortnight earlier. “He’s a Captain Bude in the Life Guards,” Daphne told Pauline. “You ought to be excited. He is worth a pot of money, and he has just finished running the Countess Craghart.”

Daphne was excited; Pauline was annoyed, hurt and finally frightened. Every day, with some little attention, some little special mark of notice, he would show that, despite her rebuffs, he was still intent on victory. Once, he had followed her all the way home to Chelsea. Not speaking to her, just setting all her being in a quiver of suspense by the knowledge that he sat there, behind her, on the top of the bus, his sombre eyes watching her every movement. He had taken Daphne out on two or three occasions. He knew where they lived. Daphne, Pauline felt sure, would have no hesitation in talking about her, in telling him all she could.

So, this evening, when Harry smiled at her in his peculiar knowing manner, as he took her down in the lift, Pauline quite knew what to expect. Captain Bude’s figure was waiting, as she had known it would be, posed against the photographer’s showcase. Madame Pruenella must have seen him and drawn her own cynical conclusions as she went out. Daphne had probably stopped to whisper, “She’ll be down in ten minutes.”

Pauline felt the hot flush stain her cheeks as he moved to take off his hat to her.

“You are going to let me drive you home tonight, aren’t you?” he said. “I kept my car for that purpose.”

Behind him, in the glass case, she could see photographs of herself and Daphne in some of the newest of Madame Pruenella’s evening dresses. There was one of herself, posed like some gorgeous butterfly. The bunched up, many coloured tulle skirt gathered in at the waist with a bunch of orchids; the bodice leaving all her back bare, just held over the shoulders by straps of glittering stones. She was standing sideways, looking backward over her shoulder at the photographer, with her hair dressed high and a wide sweeping feather of yellow just brushing one bare shoulder tip. It was a provocative pose. She looked, she thought, as her shamed eyes lit on it, wanton, as if she gloried in that indecent dress, that startling claim to beauty. Her eyes came back from that picture to the man and he realized suddenly that she looked very white, very tired.

“Do let me,” he said, on a gentler key. “Or, look here, if it’s me you dislike, take the car. The man shall drive you. I’ve been a bit of a beast worrying you with what you don’t want, and tonight you do look jolly tired.”

The rattle of Harry’s lift sounded behind them, it disgorged Miss Blatch and five or six of the work girls. Pauline had to draw closer to the man to let them pass, and they viewed her with discreet eyes, tittering with laughter as they passed but.

Everyone thought that she did this kind of thing as a matter of course. Why, what was she fighting for? She looked up at the man.

“I am tired,” she agreed. “I’d like to be driven home. But, please, come too.”

They swept up Bond Street and into the Park down one of the side streets. The sensation was very delicious, and Captain Bude said and did nothing to disturb it. Indeed he sat very quiet and silent beside her, and it was Pauline who finally spoke.

“Daphne will be pleased,” she said. “To her, I have been wasting my chances.”

“And you?” the man asked. “Do you feel as if you had taken the definite step towards perdition?”

She looked at him quickly, a little startled by his penetration, and, meeting the quizzical expression in his grey blue eyes, she had to laugh.

“What I feel, what I don’t feel, it does not matter very much, does it?” she asked. “I have come.”

“No. Perhaps it does not,” he agreed. “Only I would like you to do it again, you know. And I hate to be looked on as a deadly sin.”

She sat silent, her face a little turned from him. “I won’t let you be that,” she said. “I am afraid you’ll find me awfully dull.”

At that he laughed right out, throwing his head back.

“Don’t be afraid, most charming of ladies,” he said. “I’ll not ask you to kiss me, or anything of the sort, you shall put the limit on our friendship, and keep it there.”

To have a friend, that would be something in the rather drear make pretence of her life. Pauline turned to climb up the stairs to her attic, after she had said good-bye to Captain Bude, with a lighter heart than she had known for many a week. In fact, she ran to meet the blow fate had decided to deal to her.

Mrs. Sterne was sitting on the only chair of which the room boasted. She rose to her feet as Pauline came in, coming forward,with both hands held out.

“My dear,” she said; she drew Pauline close to her and kissed her with prim old lips. “I have been waiting for you, I had to come. It is a thing I could not just write in a letter to you. Robin is at home. He—he insists upon a divorce.”

Chapter XVII

Love Lies Bleeding

You cannot kill love so!
Beyond the limit of your days;
Beyond the parting of the ways;
When pride is hushed, and hate is passed;
Love will come back at last.

Robin did not take his letter from Pauline to Gallard. Had he done so he would probably have learnt some home truths and been given some good advice. And, just at this moment in his career, he felt that advice of any sort would drive him mad. He was not in the mood to weigh this point in her letter and then that. He did not discern, for one thing, that she wrote “a man who loves me,” not “a man whom I love.” And even if he had discerned it, it would have made very little difference. In things that touched honour Robin was very intolerant of wrong doing. Quite apart from whether she loved him, or did not love him, this thing that Pauline had done was dishonourable. His sore heart could find no condonation for her there.

And how sore his heart was! The pain of it amazed him, irritated him, drove him to an attitude of grim silence. His feelings had made a fool of him. He had always dreaded lest they should. Away with them, then! He would feel nothing, say nothing, show nothing. Act, yes; there remained the power to act. Pauline had asked for a divorce; she should have it.’

He put in his application for leave on urgent family affairs. Gallard, scenting trouble, sent, for him, would have had him confide. Gallard found himself up against a stone wall; a strange young man with very hard eyes.

Yes, he had written the C.S. telling what his reasons for wishing for leave were. He hoped it would be granted. If not, he would have to chuck in his hand and go.

“What is it, Sterne?” Gallard asked, driven to bluntness. “You know, of course, I will forward your application for leave and recommend it. But I might carry more weight if I knew more.”

“I am sorry, sir,” said Sterne. “I’m afraid I cannot talk of it, even, to you.”

Perhaps Gallard might have pressed for an explanation, or have elicited one by tactful sympathy, but he had lost interest in things. Something had snapped in his nervous system during that fortnight in the forest. Physically, he seemed ten years older. He let Sterne go, and forwarded the application, recommending it, as he had said he would.

Whether it was his recommendation, or Robin’s private explanation, the desired result was achieved. Sterne was granted six months’ leave on urgent family affairs. He was to go as soon as he could obtain a passage.

He went at once, saying briefly that he would go via the Nile and risk getting on to the first boat at Port Said, always a fairly easy thing for a man travelling on his own to do. The station turned out to see him off. Mrs. Thomas, optimistically cheerful as ever, full of messages which he was to deliver to Pauline as soon as he saw her. Robin listened to her with a set face, and, watching him, Gallard drew his own conclusions. He did not say anything about them though. He went back to his work in the office, his life in his immaculately kept house, his polite conversations with Mrs. Gallard. It was another life gone astray, another chance of happiness missed, that was all. Men and women had always made that sort of stupid mistake, would always make it till the end of time.

Robin had an uneventful journey up the Nile. He was alone for most of the way, and his feelings, his—what Mrs. Sterne would have called it—his intolerance, had time to harden. He went over and over again his time with Pauline; his chivalry to her; his love for her. Again and again he took it out, held it aloft, and jeered at it. He had loved her and she had done this to him. Every time he thought of that, it was as though he took a knife and stabbed it into a raw wound. He did not at all realize that it was jealousy that held the knife and stabbed and prodded and poked, and would not let his heart rest. He only knew that when he thought of that other man, of whom Pauline had written, he felt, that he too—as Satan had done—could take a man’s neck in his two hands and wring it to death. That was a very instinctive, primeval feeling. Sterne was even a little ashamed of it. He was not at all ashamed of the anger that burnt in his hurt heart against Pauline.

At Port Said, when he had to wait for three days for the first boat to come in, he made the acquaintance of a sporting party who had been up in the interior on a shooting trip. Not that he wanted to make anyone’s acquaintance, not that he had the slightest desire for companionship or friendliness. Of his own free will, he would have steered clear of them, only the lady of the party, having once set her eyes on him, willed otherwise. She was fairly bored with the intrigue which had kept her amused for the last three months, she was really looking round for a fresh victim when she happened to see Robin.

“Go and fetch him over, Tom,” she said to the latest cavalier who had got to the fetch-and-carry stage. “He looks very bored and rather interesting.”

An amazing lady, this, who suddenly floated into Robin’s life. There are Cleopatras in all ages and all ranks, women with that mysterious fascination of their sex that will make men lay away their honour, their wealth, their very lives; of such women was the Countess Craghart. She was not very young, not even very beautiful, but amazingly slim and lithe, with a face undoubtedly Egyptian in its lines, in its heavy lidded, slanting eyes. Snake’s eyes, women were inclined to call them, but men spoke enthusiastically of their beauty, of the glow that one could waken in their depths. She had small, firm lips and very regular, white teeth. When she smiled, which was often, it was only with her lips; but when she laughed, the laughter glowed in her eyes.

Such as she was she had been for the last twenty years, but the Countess herself would tell you that she was thirty three, and that she had married her first husband when she had been sixteen. She had had three husbands since, the war having accounted for two. Husbands, it would seem, were a necessary evil in her social life. Once married to them, she saw as little of them as possible. There were three men on this present trip with her, but the Earl was not one of them.

This was the party that Robin was bidden to join, and had, as a matter of fact, small chance of escaping.

His moodiness, his evident indifference to her charms, roused what there was of pride in the Countess’s heart. She set herself out to win him. Here was a new fish to tackle, one, she realized, that would require all her skill. He was really, this too she realized, hardly worthy of her fishing tackle. He belonged to a Civil Service that she had never even heard of. He, obviously, was not wealthy, he showed no great promise of being amusing. But, as a distraction, he would serve to pass the time and she really was very fed up with Tommy. That Robin did not prove easy to capture only served to sharpen her wits. The weapons she used were as old as the world.

Hurt from his wounded pride, bitterly unhappy in his suppressed love, it was small wonder that Robin found her flattery soothing. She was a woman who very well knew, how to sympathize and understand. Where he had been unwilling to confide in anyone before, to her he told everything, and it is very certain that her judgment went against Pauline. That was only natural. She was clever enough to see that it was along those lines that Robin wished to be supported, and it was quite instinctive for her to side against a woman. Had they not always sided against her?

The lazy days aboard ship, the evenings, when they danced, or when they sat under the stars and talked softly together, brought Robin into a close companionship with the Countess. It can hardly be said that he made love to her. She found him rather dull in that, but it left her always with a sense of something to conquer, and that, to someone satiated with victory, was quite a pleasant sensation.

They parted, anyway, the best of friends, with many invitations, on her part, for Robin to come and see her in London. She was to be in town for the next three months, she would so miss him if he failed to come. Robin promised to meet her for lunch the following Thursday, and went off down to Lower Towers, and his mother, in a very bad temper. He was being a damned fool as far as the lady with the slanting Egyptian eyes was concerned, and, at this stage in his career, being a damned fool made him dangerously sulky.

His mother found him difficult to talk to, hard to understand. She had met neither the boat nor the train. He had especially asked her not to, and she respected his trouble sufficiently not to thrust herself into it. She was waiting for him, though, in the drawing-room, sitting very erect in the chair that, in his irreverent youth, Robin had been used to allude to as “Sacred to the memory of Ma.” How would he greet her? Would he listen at all to what she had to say to him? She had his letter, the one that had followed his cable. It had almost confirmed her worst fears. So stiffly had he written, with all the poetry of his love laid aside. Would she dare to quote to him what he himself had written of Pauline? “I claim you still for mine own love’s sake.” Would it be any use her putting forward all the arguments, the pleas, of which her mind had thought? Oh, she wanted to fight for Pauline, if only because, in so fighting, she struggled for the good which was in her son’s nature. If he denied love when love showed him the road to forgiveness, all his life would be the worse, the bitterer, for that.

Her first sight of his face dismayed her. Robin, really sulky, had always been difficult to deal with. She pushed the dismay aside, though, and gave him tea, talking gently of his voyage home, of the changes in the house since he had been there last. Then, with tea cleared away, and the whole house quietened down to a twilight calm, she drew him to a chair beside her and, holding his hands in hers, she began speaking of Pauline.

“Let me speak,” she said, when he would have stopped her. “I’m your mother dear. Do you think the things that hurt your heart don’t wound mine? Listen, Robin. When first I heard of this thing and came, from the hearing of it, to read your letters, telling of your love for her, I felt as though I could have killed her. Well, perhaps not that. I have never been a very blood-thirsty person; but, at least, I felt it would be very difficult to forgive. But, Robin, I’ve lived sixty odd years in the world and it’s taught me one thing, never to judge. Oh, no, never, not however clear the facts are. That is what made me go and see her. Robin!” She felt his hands stiffen against hers and she looked up quickly, trying to catch his eye, but he was looking away from her and his mouth was very sullen. “Robin,” she went on, a little desperately. “Pauline is very young, she was very ignorant. All the time, I really believe this, Robin, it is you that she loved. Can you not find a little forgiveness in your heart. It was so full of love when you wrote me.”

Robin’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Need we talk about love?” he asked. “It makes things more bitter for me, that is all.”

“‘Love is kind and suffers long,’” quoted Mrs. Sterne very softly. He flung her hands away and sprang up.

“Would you have me love someone else’s wife?” he asked. “Isn’t that what it amounts to? She has lived with him.” He laughed sharply. “You know how my love exalted her, mother? She was too pure, too holy, for me to touch!”

Perhaps, for the first time, a little flash of hope came to Mrs. Sterne. Robin was jealous. If he was jealous, he still loved; if he loved, he would not be able to shut his heart against Pauline altogether.

“You say she is his wife,” she answered. “No, Robin, the truth about that you have got to hear, whether you like it or not. She lived with him a month, a bitter, hurtful month; though, perhaps, you will not allow yourself to believe that. And then he left her. She is working in London now. She is living—Clare calls it existing—on two pounds a week. She knows the African station did not sell and that her father’s debts swallowed up what capital he left, and she will not take your money.”

He turned to stare at her, but there was very little softening on his face. “And the man?” he asked. “Does he hope to have to escape paying by these methods?”

She shivered a little, hearing him. “Pauline will not touch his money,” she answered.

“That won’t prevent me making him pay,” he said, and turned to the window.

Outside, in the late evening sun, the garden slumbered, very quiet coloured, very peaceful. Its trees, great old fir trees, pointing to the sky; its lawns, close cropped, clean swept, neat in their border lines of faint flowers. How peaceful it was, and how his heart ached! He would have liked to cry out its bitterness against the stiff black silk of his mother’s skirt. Her hands would comfort him, were aching to comfort him, he knew. Only, this bitterness of his anger stood between. For once in his life his mother failed to understand. That other woman, with the queer slanting eyes, with the voice that woke a man’s thoughts to strange desires, she had understood better.

He came back from the window and stood by Mrs. Sterne.

“Look here, Mother,” he said stiffly. “Don’t let us talk of it again, please. She—Pauline—has hurt me damnably. I want to take my gruel like a man. But I can’t talk about it, discuss it, weigh the right and the wrong. She wishes me to divorce her, I propose to do so. Under the circumstances, no other course would be possible to me. I could never take her back as my wife after what has happened.”

Mrs. Sterne rose slowly. She was almost as tall as her son, standing there, together, they, were very alike.

“Very well, dear,” she said. Her eyes met his gravely with no reproach in their glance, yet, somehow they made him feel that he had failed her. “It shall be as you say. I will never speak of her again, unless you speak to me. But you are making a mistake, Robin, that much I must say. You are pushing out of your life something that would have been most precious to you. I hope to God you will come to regret it.”

She was quite true to her word. In the three weeks that he stayed with her she never spoke to him again of Pauline, nor did he speak to her. She knew that he had been to the lawyers, that the whole business had been set on foot. He had Pauline’s letter, giving the facts of the case; she would not, Mrs. Sterne knew, attempt any defence; there was little use in Dennison trying to keep out of it. Ugly, and bitter, and quite, quite simple. It would take up a small paragraph in the daily papers and that would be all.

And Pauline! What was to become of Pauline? Mrs. Sterne carried about with her for many a day, the memory of the room where Pauline lived, the girl’s face, her stricken eyes.

“He won’t forgive. He can’t forgive. Why did I think he would?”

She had stayed for a little; trying to give what comfort she could. She was quite determined to befriend Pauline, whatever happened. She would have the girl to stay with her, when Robin had gone back. She would help her to find work more suitable, more congenial. All this she whispered to Pauline, sitting beside the girl, watching the white strained face, the eyes that stared out of that miserable skylight at the smoke from the chimneys opposite. And Pauline never answered, never stirred. Except, just at the end, when she looked up, with something in her face that made Mrs. Sterne think of an ill-treated child.

“What does it matter what happens to me?” she whispered. “You are trying to be kind, but what does it really matter?”

Mrs. Sterne hated to leave her, yet she could hardly stay all night, and there was Daphne, home earlier than usual as she was going to a dance, and had to get dressed. It gave Mrs. Sterne rather a shock to see Daphne. To hear her, to realize that it was with girls like these that Pauline was learning to know London. She doubted, for the first time, whether Madame Pruenella’s could have been the best place she could have found. Doubted, and had to leave it there. For the moment, there was nothing she could do for Pauline.

Yet the girl’s face, her “what does it matter what becomes of me?” would keep obtruding between Mrs. Sterne and her son. It snapped the sympathy that had always been between them. She was almost relieved when he announced that he would have to stay in London for the next few weeks.

Robin was more than relieved. His mother’s silence was a constant reproach to him. She never said anything, but her eyes seemed to cry out to him, “Forgive, forgive, forgive.” And he did not want to forgive; he wanted to hurt, he wanted to make someone pay for all the hurt that had been done to him.

He took rooms in town, interviewed his lawyers and danced attendance on the Countess. She upheld him in all his decisions. He was acting with extraordinary dignity and calm good sense. Sometimes he talked to her of Pauline, in the dark quiet of her room, after her other guests had been dismissed. Some need in him drove him to talk of this thing that tormented his heart, and always she fanned his anger, prodded his jealousy awake.

Dennison proposed to defend the suit. The Bartletts would not side against him, he knew. He wrote to Pauline thinking she might be able to keep his name out of it. She had agreed before, she agreed again. What did anything matter? She had offered no defence, denied nothing.

“But that position is absurd, my dear young lady,” the perplexed lawyer, sent to interview her, argued. “You cannot be guilty alone.”

It complicated the case; delayed things, since Sterne insisted upon Dennison being cited as corespondent. It might mean Pauline being questioned, cross-questioned. Mrs. Sterne would have liked to save her from that.

She wrote personally to Dennison.

“The girl has been through enough. You and I and she, for she has told me, know the truth. I shall be forced to acknowledge this if my son insists. Will you not come forward and help her even in this?”

She did not attempt to put the contempt she felt into the letter. She did not want to make him angry. He wrote very guardedly in reply. He wanted to do what he could for Pauline. He would have to consult his lawyers.

In the end he gave way with a sudden, good grace. So much Pauline was to be saved. What he had to pay, for Robin claimed heavy damages, would be settled on Pauline. In addition to what Robin proposed to give her, it would make quite a comfortable income.

Was this a sop to Robin’s conscience? Mrs. Sterne, looking at him, wondered. She said nothing, however; there was too stiff a barrier already between herself and this son whom all his life she had worshipped.

Things were in this state when one afternoon, finding Robin more morose—and, secretly, she defined it as tiresome—than usual, the Countess hit upon the bright idea of taking him with her to do some shopping.

“First Bond Street,” she explained. “And we’ll end up at Madame Prue’s for tea. She always has some lovely girls on show. Any use for lovely girls yet, Boy?”

She called him “Boy.” She had careless nicknames for every man she knew.

“Not particularly,” growled Robin. “I don’t know that I can come this afternoon, anyway. I ought to go down to Lower Towers for the week-end.”

“Nonsense,” she asserted; any slight effort to escape always made her tighten the rein. “You’ve got to come. I’ve sent Tommy away, so as to be alone with you. And I hate shopping by myself.”

Robin went, hating it ail, himself most of all.

These last few weeks had found him hating himself most intensely. They went into one or two shops and Robin bought the Countess some flowers, a thing always expected, a box of chocolates from her favourite sweet store, and a pendant that she very much admired in Vickery’s. She was becoming more expensive to him as their friendship ripened. Finally, her little motor car set them down in Bond Street, and Harry, sleekly attentive, carried them up in the lift to the purple curtained doors. A tall, good looking man, with broad shoulders, greyish hair, and grey blue eyes, was already in the lift when they got in. He took off his hat to the Countess, and she gave him one of her swift smiles; raising her eyebrows a little.

“Hulloa, Bods,” she said. “Still faithful, here, at least?”

There was an amusing stress on the word “here,” and the man laughed.

“Still faithful here and elsewhere, if you would allow me to be,” he answered.

Harry pushed open the curtained doors and announced them with gusto. There were more than half a dozen people already there. Men and women, sitting on the purple settees, sipping tea, eating cakes, laughing and talking. Daphne, posed on the little raised platform at the end of the room, was showing off a marvellously designed tea gown. Madame Pruenella rustled across in her stiff silk and extended a very effusive welcome.

“I’ve been away,” Countess Craghart explained, sinking on to a settee. “Stalking pyramids. Got anything to show me, Madame Prue? You two men ought to know each other—Captain Bude, Mr. Sterne—the Boy, for short.”

Robin and the man bowed, rather stiffly, to each other, and Madame Pruenella rustled away.

“Pauline,” Robin heard her call out. “That green and gold gown, please, with the aigrettes.”

“Pauline!” The name stung Robin. A deeper gloom descended on him. Why had he come to this wretched place? What had he in common with these idiotic men and women, with their smart clothes, their smart chatter, their useless, idle days? He sat down morosely by the Countess, since she patted the cushion next her, but he was horribly conscious, just in that flash, of how much he disliked her. Bods, as she had called Captain Bude, balanced himself on the arm of the settee near her. Robin could hear them talking together in low tones, a conversation in which he was obviously not expected to join.

“Pauline.” Damn! Was the sound of that name always going to make everything bitter for the rest of his life?

The purple curtain, cutting off a portion of the large room, was pushed aside and a radiant vision swayed into view. A girl, with gold brown hair, dressed high, drawn back from a low white forehead; gold brown eyes; fresh lips and radiant skin. Her dress, a thing of shimmering gold sequins against a background of jade green, was cut amazingly low, showing the full beauty of her neck and shoulders, the soft rounding of her perfect figure. It was very short, bunched, almost to panniers, above the slender hips. Green stockings and small gold shoes completed the costume. The brown hair, the white forehead, were encircled with a band of gold, out of which sprang up a magnificent aigrette, ornamented with jewels that flashed green.

It was beauty to take your breath away! The beauty of some strange, exotic bird of glimmering plumage! So posed, white arms and hands outspread, head high, as if conscious of the stir her appearance must make, the girl stood for a minute; then, at a sign from Madame Pruenella, she floated forward, gold shoes scarcely seeming to touch the floor.

“You see, your Ladyship, I have not exaggerated,” Madame Pruenella was saying. “Come over here, Pauline. Let her Ladyship see that aigrette close.”

Something was choking in Robin’s throat. He had to sit back, his hands clenched, to keep himself from crying out. The radiant vision came closer, the girl’s brown eyes lifted, were looking straight at his. Bods, sitting on the Countess’s other side, uttered a harsh sound.

“She is going to faint,” he cried. “Look out! Let me catch her.”

But even he was not in time. With a little fluttering of her whole body, like a beautiful bird that has been shot, Pauline, her eyes still on those hard blue eyes that denounced her, crumpled up and fell forward, the tip of her jewel-strewn aigrette brushing against Robin’s feet.

Chapter XVIII

I Claim You Still

I would tear out my thoughts of you;
For other eyes are fair to see,
And other lips are kind to me.
So I would go! The Gods must laugh
To see the thing that blocks my path.

“Such a fuss about a fainting girl,” laughed the Countess, as the lift rattled them down to the ground floor. “Bods must be in love again.”

She raised her shoulders slightly. “Personally, I don’t think much of this new divinity. The dress was magnificent, but she carried it badly, didn’t she? Shall I buy it, Boy? Do you think it would suit me?”

Robin stood in grim silence and held the door of her car open for her.

“What is the matter?” she asked. “You look horribly shocked, Boy. Has Madame Pruenella’s establishment annoyed you?”

“I suppose so,” he answered. “It is rather hateful, isn’t it? And, anyway, I suppose I am in a wretched temper to-day. Will you forgive me, if I clear off?”

“You aren’t polite,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him. “That never has been your strong point, though. Please yourself about coming. I think I shall leave town to-morrow, so if you go, this is good-bye.”

“Good-bye, then,” he agreed, and stood aside, his hat in his hand, his eyes not looking at her.

The Countess frowned. She was angry, but she was also bored. He had certainly been very boring of late. She had never found it worth her while to waste her time over affairs that bored her.

“Very well,” she said. She stepped in quickly and nodded to the chauffeur. “It is good-bye, not au revoir.”

The motor car glided away and lost itself amid the rest of the traffic. Left to himself Robin started to walk down to Piccadilly. His mind was in a tumult, his whole being throbbed. The sight of Pauline had taken hold of that wound in his heart and wrenched it open, tearing away pride, anger, and disgust. There was left only his aching love, not dead, after all, but very much alive, quivering to draw her to him.

“Go back, go back,” his thoughts kept time with his feet. “See her, speak to her. She loves you, you love her. What does anything else matter? Go back, go back.”

Half way down Piccadilly, he paused and turned round. He would go back. He would see her. He did not let his mind look further than that. He was back at Bond Street in under five minutes. She could not possibly have left yet. He could not bring himself to face Madame Pruenella’s establishment again to ask right out if he might see Pauline. It would have saved him infinite trouble had he been able to do so, but, somehow, he could not. He hung about, rather foolishly, looking first in this window, then in that, passing backwards and forwards in front of the door. Wise Harry saw him and grinned. The girls, in the shop on the ground floor, watched him from behind the window and tittered. There is something supremely ridiculous in the sight of an immaculately turned out gentleman waiting obviously, for a lady.

He must have stayed there for nearly an hour, though he kept no account of the time.

Madame Pruenella came out, sombre now, in a tight-fitting coat and skirt, a neat black toque. She hurried past him and away up the street, displaying no recognition, though she had been quick enough to realize that he was the man at whose feet Pauline had fainted. Daphne sauntered out and stood, for a minute or two, displaying her beauty under the saucily turned up feather hat, before she was joined by a man who drove up in a taxi. Miss Blatch and her fellow workers streamed out.

A long grey car stood at the pavement’s edge. It had been there for nearly as long as Robin. In between his trips up and down in the lift, Harry would lounge out and lean against it, talking to the smart chauffeur. They had a joke between them about Robin, though he was far too immersed in his own thoughts to realize they were watching him. It was getting dark, surely Pauline would not be long now!

He had just turned on his hundredth round by the flower shop, which was next door, when he saw her. She came out, quickly, preceded by Harry, followed by the tall man with the grey blue eyes. Robin could have called to her, he could have put out his hand and touched her. He did neither. A new jealousy drove him to stand right back in the shadows, and, looking neither to the right nor left, Pauline went past him and into the car whose door Harry held open for her. Captain Bude, following, let his eyes rest for a minute on Robin’s figure. He was more than a little amused, but he made no sign. Obviously the Countess’s new admirer had been desirous of deserting her for the fair Pauline.

He almost chuckled as he settled himself by Pauline in the car.

“Well, little one,” he asked, “feeling better now? What made you behave like that this afternoon? You frightened me, I can tell you.”

“Did I? said Pauline listlessly. “Was Madame cross? Miss Blatch says if I had fallen a little more sideways I should have ruined those panniers.”

“Damn the panniers!” said Captain Bude. “If you’ll let me, I’ll buy the dress for you. You looked lovely in it. You are too beautiful, Pauline, just to try dresses on.”

“Don’t!” she said quickly. “Ah, please don’t. You spoil everything for me when you speak like that. And, to-night, I am so unhappy, so horribly, unhappy.”

Her voice broke. He was horrified to see that she was crying. He sat very still, for he was wise enough to realize that what Pauline said was true. When he offered affection, when he showed himself to be anything but the placid, good-natured friend, it spoiled everything for her. In the last few weeks he had grown fond enough of Pauline not to wish to spoil things for her. Her forlornness had wakened a chivalry within him that he had not known he possessed.

“What is the matter, small friend?” he asked presently, in the most prosaic of voices. “Can’t you tell me? It will help, believe me, it will. Upon my soul, I never knew such a little all on its own soul, as yours.”

It all came out in a rush then. Her marriage; the voyage home; Dennison—how her face burnt to speak of him—Robin’s mother, and what Robin’s mother had thought; what Pauline herself had dreamed of and hoped for; and then, Robin’s ultimate decision.

“I was so silly to hope,” she said, tears hushed now, her face very white and piteous. “Why should he forgive? It would not be easy for any man to. forgive a thing like that, would it? You wouldn’t be able to, would you?”

“Don’t you ask me personal questions about it,” he answered gently. “It cuts too close. I hope to God I’d have eyes quicker to see the truth than that too good husband of yours.”

“He has never seen me,” Pauline explained, taking him up literally. “At least, not till to-day. This afternoon.” She shivered, putting her hands up to her eyes. “In that dress, with everyone staring at me. His eyes burnt me, they were the only things I saw before I fainted.”

Bude whistled! His mind had suddenly leapt to an astounding knowledge. “Sterne,” he said. “So that was him, was it? Poor little girl!”

His hand on hers was very cool, very friendly, yet hot thoughts were pounding through his veins. That man waiting in the shadow had been waiting for Pauline. Why, if it was not because the sight of her had weakened his resolutions? He had been going to see her, to speak to her. If he did that, he would have to be a blind fool indeed if he did not realize that the girl loved him. And if he realized that, what would the other miserable mistake matter? Nothing, at least not in Captain Bude’s estimation of life. But here Captain Bude’s own desires sprang to life, if he kept silent about that waiting figure he had seen, if he let the man go on thinking what he would probably be bound to think, having seen Pauline driven away in the car, what then? Freedom for Pauline! A definite wrench with the thing she now loved! A drifting! Would she not be bound to drift into the shelter of his arms? Captain Bude’s thoughts even played with marriage as the ultimate end of this adventure. He was very nearly fond enough of Pauline to marry her. She would never be happy in any other life. As Dennison had said, “Respectability” was the only road for her.

The car turned into the gloom of Whitehead Square and stopped at the door of Pauline’s house. Captain Bude jerked himself out of his thoughts.

“Look here, Pauline,” he said. “You really love this wretched man?”

“Yes,” said Pauline. “I love him. But it isn’t any use. He’ll never understand or want my love again.”

She tried to laugh, a wretched little affair that ended on a sob. “You’ll have to help me to forget,” she said. “There is nothing else for me to do.”

He was suddenly touched out of his selfishness. “Well, I don’t know,” he said quickly. “I am going to help you some way or other, be very sure of that.”

Without love, Mrs. Sterne had felt, there could be no jealousy. She would have been satisfied if she could have seen the storm of jealousy that shook Robin that evening, as he turned away from his long vigil of waiting for Pauline. It would be almost true to say that for the moment he was mad with it. It raised forces within him that he had never realized existed. For all his grown-up life had been ruled by pleasant, gentlemanly laws of thought and behaviour; he had had preconceived ideas about love, for one thing, and they had failed him. Faced with the hurt that Pauline had dealt him, through this unexplainable love that had invaded his life, he had attempted to gather his preconceived notions about him again. Pauline was not worthy to be his wife. “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.” He had set in operation the law which should pluck this offending love out of his life, and lo! suddenly, fully armed, in his path the animal instinct jealousy had sprung up. Let her go! Let her marry, or live with, that other man, who already it seemed had set up some sort of claim to her! No, and again no, no!

“I would rather see her dead.” His thoughts raced. “It would be better that she should be dead than leading a life of shame.”

And jealousy screamed derision, at him.

“She had better be dead than in another man’s arms.”

All night he fought the battle out, seeing her always in that green dress, her crowned head at his feet. He pushed away the thoughts of what had followed, of the man with the grey blue eyes, and his possessive hands. In the morning, looking haggard and grim, as though he had struggled with a mortal illness, he went back to his mother.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “The divorce shall not go through. Will you write Pauline and ask her to meet me here?”

His face had alarmed Mrs. Sterne, his manner chilled her. Nevertheless, she tried to reach behind the armour of his aloofness.

“What has happened, Robin?” she asked. “You know your news makes me glad, yet there is something behind it that frightens me.”

“I am sorry,” he answered. “I cannot change myself. In this thing you have never understood me.”

Did he understand himself, she wondered, and sighed. But she put away the hurt his words had dealt her, they could not alter or touch her love for him. She wrote Pauline:

“My Own Dear Girl,

“Something has happened which has caused Robin to change his mind. He wishes to see you. He has given me no reasons, and I cannot question him. But I know he is very far from happy and I must admit to being a little worried. Perhaps, it remains to you, Pauline, to put things right. Will you come, dear, as soon as you can?”

Robin had relented! He had realized the abnegation of her soul as she had fallen before him! Those were the thoughts that thrilled through Pauline. She waited for nothing else. Like a child, her heart leapt up to meet joy, forgetting the tears that were past. Daphne carried her excuses to Madame Pruenella, a quick fluttered message to Captain Bude. He had been her friend, he would be glad to know her joy.

“Tell him how happy I am, Daphne. How gloriously happy. It is all going to come right at last!”

For herself, she packed up her things and caught the first train down to Lower Towers. The carriage was at the station to meet her, but not Robin. That was right. How should they meet each other, with all that lay between them, where other eyes could see their meeting. None the less, the lonely drive up to the house chilled her hopes a little, made her feel nervous and afraid. Mrs. Sterne met her in the hall and held her for a long minute in her arms.

“I could not come to the station, dear,” she explained. “It was my ‘Mothers’ day.” Her arms tightened a fraction. “Robin is in the drawing-room,” she added. “ Oh, Pauline, Pauline, remember to be very patient.”

As if she needed that warning! Nothing could have exceeded the humbleness of Pauline’s heart. Just inside the door she paused, and it seemed to her as though she must be going to faint again, the room so swayed and darkened before her eyes. And then she saw Robin’s figure standing by the window, his back to her. He must have heard her come in, he must know she was standing there, he was waiting for her to speak.

“Robin,” Pauline said. “Robin.” She put out her two hands. “I—I’ve come.”

It seemed that even then he was not minded to turn and look at her, but she saw his hands clench and she knew how difficult this meeting must be for him. Her own nervousness was forgotten in her desire to help him. But she could think of nothing to say. She just stood there and looked at him, her hands fallen back at her sides.

Presently he turned round, his face still in the shadow so that she could not see his mouth or eyes.

“I suppose you saw me the other day at that place in Bond Street?” he said.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I—I was ashamed.”

“Ashamed!” he repeated and laughed, his laughter flecking the colour to her cheeks. “Had you really any need to be?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Come,” he seemed to say to himself. “I must remember to be a gentleman even in these trying circumstances.” He moved.

“Will you not sit down?” he said, very politely. “What I have to say will not take long, but you may as well have a chair.”

Pauline came forward and sat down in the chair he held for her. She felt suddenly very cold, very quiet, all her radiant gladness of the morning fled. She sat listening to him, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes lowered.

“You know what I came home for,” he began quickly. “Your letter did not leave me much else to do, did it? I realized that our marriage had been a ghastly mistake. You, apparently, had realized it also and had gone your own way to end it. You asked me to divorce you. There was no reason whatsoever why I should refuse. Is that not correct?”

“Yes,” she whispered again, without looking up. It was as though, one by one, he took her dreams and stabbed them to death beneath her lowered eyes. “I came home with that intention,” he went on hoarsely, her meekness was hurting him more than he could bear, he wanted to sting her to rebellion. “And my mother met me with a different story. It had all been a mistake, your experiment. The man had deserted you. You were on your own in London, miserably unhappy, working for a hopelessly small wage. My mother evidently expected me to forgive and forget. I—I could not bring myself to do so. You had wanted your freedom, you should have it. Then, then, that other day, at that ghastly place! You, in those clothes, like some peacock strutting and posing for everyone to watch and admire. My God! Pauline, you were still my wife. It was my name that you were dragging in the mud like that.”

“No,” she answered quite quietly. “It was my own. I haven’t used your name since I wrote saying I would not.”

“I think I would rather have seen you dead,” he said bitterly, and strode away to the window again.

Pauline stood up. Somewhere, from among the wreck of her hopes, she was able to call pride to her aid.

“Was it to tell me this, that you sent for me?” she asked.

He swung round. “ No, and yes,” he answered. She saw his face flush, a curious dull red. “I waited to speak to you that evening. I saw you come out. I saw your companion. You are still my wife. My mother tells me you wish to remain my wife. Very well, I agree. But as my wife there are some things you shall not do.”

So it was unmasked between them at last. The grim, instinctive force in whose name he claimed her. There was no forgiveness in his heart, no understanding. Pauline’s eyes hardened to sudden contempt as she faced him.

“For one thing, I had to ask your forgiveness,” she said. “Because of that, you must do as you choose. I will abide by your decision.”

Chapter XIX

Whatever The Cost

Did I say love must end with Death?
Yet, at this last,
Your soul comes close to mine, and all the pain
Of life is past.

Mrs. Thomas, with baby Dick in her arms, was superintending the haphazard gardening which she from time to time indulged in. Big Dick was lying on a long chair on the veranda, the bundle of recently arrived home newspapers scattered all around. It was Sunday, which accounted for Big Dick’s pyjama clad figure and the general air of lazy quiet pervading the station.

“I am going to pull up all those geraniums,” Mrs. Thomas’s clear, eager voice floated back to him, “and put in morning glory, Dick. Don’t you think blue morning glory will look too lovely just there? It will hide that ugly old hen run. Dick!” She swung round to look at him. “I do wish you would take a little interest in the garden, especially on Sundays, when you really have the time.”

Captain Thomas flapped his paper at her and laughed. “My dear,” he answered, “I think everything in the garden is lovely every day in the week, Sundays included. Come over here, I’ve found a tit-bit in the papers that, will make your, ears burn.”

“One of your nasty murders.” Mrs. Thomas said. She moved leisurely towards him, putting Baby Dick down on the veranda as she reached it. With his sun hat cocked over one eye Baby Dick, took immediate action to crawl down the steps again, and she paused to watch him.

“He’s awfully obstinate,” she sighed. “He is like you. He adores getting hot in the sun. What is your news, Dick?”

“Well, come here, my lady. Put your nose down and sniff it. Your romantic mind will be burning for a fortnight.”

“Then it’s not a murder,” said Mrs. Thomas, and strolled towards him, leaning over his shoulder to read the paragraph his finger pointed to.

“The case of Sterne v. Sterne and Dennison has been withdrawn. Settled out of Court.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Thomas. She sat down on the veranda, disregarding the imminent danger of her son. “Oh Dick! Then he isn’t—then he can’t divorce her?”

“He apparently is not going to,” contended Dick. He folded up the paper and sat staring in front of him, whistling. “There has been some rum story behind all this,” he added, meditatively.

“He made some idiotic mistake,” Mrs. Thomas flamed out. She always flamed when she thought of poor, ill-used Pauline; for so she had decided the girl must be when she had heard the first whisper of divorce. “You know, Dick, I always thought he was rather stupid and very narrow-minded.”

“You did your best to drag him into matrimony, anyway,” laughed Dick. “I was just wondering if you did not feel a little guilty when Gallard told us about the smash up. By jove! Gallard will be glad about this. He seemed to take the idea of the divorce very badly to heart.”

“Mr. Gallard is not a bit well,” said Mrs. Thomas, with her usual sweep from one topic of conversation to another. “It is no use saying anything to Nanette, but I think he looks worse every day.”

“He has certainly been confoundedly depressed since that trip of his with Sterne. Which reminds me,” Thomas sat up, scattering the papers in all directions. “Let us have breakfast, Milly. I have got to see the P.C. about something.”

“Well, I like that,” remonstrated Mrs. Thomas. She made a dash after her son and rescued him from the bottom step. “Baby and I have been ready for the last hour. I had to garden to fill in the time. And now you say ‘Let’s have breakfast,’ still in your pyjamas!”

“Sorry, old girl,” laughed Captain Thomas. “I won’t be ten minutes. I’m shaved and all.”

Over breakfast, Mrs. Thomas came back to the subject of Pauline. “She was one of the most innocent-minded girls I have ever known,” she said. “It was quite impossible to think of her deserving what that great idiot, Mr. Sterne, proposed to do. It nearly broke mother Magdalene’s heart when she heard of it.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it was all fun to Sterne,” argued Dick. “Hang it all, old girl, a man doesn’t do that kind of thing for fun.”

“He should have been more careful, more trusting,” she answered, and Captain Thomas laughed.

“You are very Irish in your arguments,” he said. “Give me some more coffee, please.”

“Are you going to see Mr. Gallard about this bit of news?” Mrs. Thomas asked, as he lit his pipe preparatory to departing.

Captain Thomas shook his head. “I’ll ask him if he has seen it,” he said. “But I want to tell him about a rum beggar my eskaries brought in yesterday. He had a packet for Gallard. I meant to give it him yesterday, but forgot.”

“Oh, well, ask him to tea this afternoon,” Mrs. Thomas called out after him. “I haven’t seen Nanette for days.”

Thomas found Gallard sitting by himself on the wide veranda of the P.C.’s house that faced the snows. Mrs. Gallard was not visible. She was very rarely in the mood to see visitors before lunch. Gallard was doing nothing it seemed. Just sitting, with his eyes on the hills. Of late he often fell into these moods of absolute listlessness. They were causing his friends a good deal of uneasiness, though Mrs. Gallard was more apt to be annoyed with them than anything else.

“Good morning, sir,” said Thomas, cheerfully, planting himself on the veranda rails. “It’s a topping view you get from, here.”

“Yes,” agreed Gallard. “It is a wonderful view, hills and the forest. That is a bit of the forest, you know, Thomas. One of its octopus-like arms. You’ve seen about the Sterne case?”

“My wife and I were just reading it before I came over,” Thomas admitted. “Milly is very jubilant. She was always quite convinced that Sterne was making a mistake of sorts.”

“Yes, he made a mistake,” Gallard nodded. “One should stand by the woman one loves, whatever the cost, eh?”

He seemed huddled in his chair, as though sitting upright entailed too much exertion. There was no doubt about it, Thomas thought, Gallard was certainly ill. Mildred was right in that.

“Strange being blew into the Boma yesterday afternoon, sir,” he said. “The eskaries brought him over to my house. He wanted to see you. Said he came from the land beyond the forest, or some such rigmarole. Had a letter of sorts, anyway, addressed to you. So I took it and told them to house him for the night. Did not know if you’d want to be bothered with him before Monday.”

“You have the letter?” asked Gallard.

Thomas felt in his pockets. “Yes,” he said. “ It looks years old and it’s none too clean. But it is addressed to you right enough.”

Gallard held out his hands and Thomas put the packet into them, for it was more of a packet than a letter. Tied round with fibre, worn and very dirty at the edges, the faint handwriting was still discernible across its centre:

H. Gallard, Esq., D.C., Fort Portal.

Gallard looked up and Thomas thought there was something oddly perturbing about his face.

“The man?” he said. “Where did you say the man was?”

“I told them to let him sleep in the lines,” Thomas answered. “I can send for him, if you like.”

“Yes, please do,” said Gallard. He stood up, he held the packet clutched in his hands, his lips worked nervously. “At once, Thomas; I’ll see him at once.”

Thomas realized he was being dismissed. “I’ll go along and send him up,” he said. “By the way, the wife hopes you and Mrs. Gallard will come to tea this afternoon.”

“Yes,” agreed Gallard. “Yes, of course. This afternoon.”

Thomas went off whistling, and confided to his wife afterwards that he thought she was right. Gallard was certainly ill. “I believe it’s one of those beastly heart diseases,” he added. “I could see this morning when he was talking to me, that he got sudden stabs of pain. He tried to hide it but I could see it in his face.”

Sudden stabs of pain! Were they mental or physical? Gallard, himself, was not quite sure. That he was ill he certainly knew. Had known it, ever since he came back from the forest. Sometimes he felt, as he had been feeling this morning when Thomas had joined him, that it would not be for long, that death had, in reality, touched him in the forest, that in a few more weeks the hand would tighten and the end would come. They would give his disease some mysterious name if he went to the hospital. What did it matter what they called it? Death, in the end, is the same.

His eyes came back to the packet he held in his hands and he sat down again, opening it very slowly. He knew what he was going to find. It had something to do with the pain that had stabbed him. “One should stand by the woman one loves, whatever the cost!”

Three or four closely written sheets of paper fell out as he opened the packet. Some sheets of paper and a very faded photograph. He picked that up first. It was just a very indifferent snapshot of a baby; unmounted, imperfectly toned. The faded face eluded him, but on the back was written, “Pauline, my baby, 1905,” and as he read it Gallard smiled, a grim, twisted smile. Then he picked up the sheets of paper. They were in no sense a letter; there was no beginning, no end. The writing on one page began—

“I write because I am going mad. I shall be happier mad. Yet it terrifies me to think of it. I shall sit gibbering, laughing in this great hut they have built for me, and the blind men will, bring me food and feel with their fingers for my mouth so as to feed me. They horrify me, my six blind men. I could hear them screaming for mercy the day their eyes were put out. Pain has made them cruel and they hate me.”

Gallard could not read any more of that page. Her poor horror shook him. He could see her, as he had found her, lying with her six blind men on guard.

He turned to another.

“I’ve been here now six years,” it ran. “I can’t count the days but I can count the years. I’ve only one piece of paper left. He’s dead, he died last night. Six years. Pauline must be ten years old. A little girl. I wish I could die. I should have died that six years ago but I did not dare. It will be like this now to the end. They are afraid of me, but they won’t kill me, they won’t let me die. I think he told them I was some sort of God. They seem to worship me. They bring gifts, their sick people, I am supposed to make them well. If I could run away where could I go? The forest shuts this country in as though it had been a wall specially built.”

The pencilling on the earlier pages was very blurred, Gallard could only make a sentence out here and there.

“I don’t know where he is taking me. I don’t much mind. The forest is wonderful. If only I could forget. The whip hurt, I am a coward when things hurt me. I ought to have died. This—this is worse than death.”

Poor blurred pages! Poor faded picture!

“Pauline, my baby, 1905!” “We should stand by the woman we love at whatever cost!”

He had not stood by her. The cost had seemed too great. His career, just started, his honour, wonderful word! His people at home, who would have been so hurt.

Had she known that he loved her? It was strange, surely, that his name should have been the one her fingers traced at the last. She had ached for human sympathy, human memory. It was understandable that. And he had been kind to her, grim mockery, in that dim past. In the end her hands had stretched out to him.

An eskarie came stiffly and noisily to attention at the foot of the steps and Gallard looked up. A queer apparition stood beside the eskarie, a little, old, wizened native, a string of beads adorning his middle, a blue monkey skin flung over one shoulder, the rim of a battered straw hat on his head.

“The man, effendi,” said the eskarie, and looked rather contemptuously at his companion.

Gallard stood up, the scraps of paper and the photograph clenched in his hands.

“What language does he speak?” he asked.

“He can understand Swahili,” the eskarie answered. “His language is of the monkeys.”

“Very well,” said Gallard. “You can leave us then, I can talk to him in Swahili.”

The eskarie saluted and swung away. The man squatted down where he stood, his eyes blinking at Gallard. For a second the white man hesitated. He looked round, there was no one within sight or hearing. He went down the steps and sat on the one higher than the old man. The pain was back, gripping his heart. He could not stand.

“What had you to tell me?” he asked in Swahili. The shrewd old face puckered up, the eyes showed further intelligence.

“The Bwana will pay me money for the letter I have brought? Good money? It was difficult to bring. They would have killed me had they known.”

“Yes,” said Gallard patiently. “How did you know to find me?”

“I am not of their people.” There was a trace of scorn in the old voice. “I come from this side of the mountains. She spoke to me and I could understand.”

“Yes,” said Gallard again. “Why did they kill her?”

“They did not kill her,” the old man answered. “She killed herself, and they were angry and afraid, thinking great ill would come.”

Gallard stood up. “For the letter you have brought you shall have twenty florins,” he said, “provided you leave here and speak to no one of the things that you have seen and known. You would not be believed. You bring foolishness on your head by such tales.”

“No,” the native agreed. “I should not be believed. Yet it will make a good tale for an old man to tell.”

“If I hear it from others,” said Gallard, “I will send for you and I will take back the florins that I give. What is more, I will have you beaten for spreading lies against the honour of a white woman.”

The wrinkled face broke into a monkey-like grin. “They are not lies, Bwana,” the old man said. “You and I know the truth. Even so, let it be as you wish. I will not speak.”

Gallard went back to the house to fetch the twenty florins and met Mrs. Gallard just coming out on to the veranda.

“Lunch is ready. What are you doing, Harry? she asked. “Who is your old friend? And why do you look so ill? You really do look ill, this morning.”

“Do I?” he answered. “I’m sorry. I’m just paying this man some money that is due to him. I’ll be in to lunch in a minute.”

But his minute proved a long one. She heard him cry out presently, and there was something so peculiar in the sound that even Mrs. Gallard hurried. He had fallen as he had stooped over the money box. His face was so twisted with pain that she drew back in fear, and it was their head boy who picked him up. Gallard’s hands were clenched on some papers, the florins lay scattered at his feet.

“Take twenty of them,” he was able to whisper. “That old man by the steps. They are his. Tell him to go away.” All this in the native tongue to Satan, who had run in and was helping the head boy to hold him. Then to Mrs. Gallard:

“Tell them to put me on my bed. Don’t be scared, Nanette. I’ll be all right when the pain lifts.”

They carried him to his bed and he lay there, obviously in agony. Mrs. Gallard wrung her hands and sent for the doctor and Mrs. Thomas. She had never pretended to be a sick nurse. She disliked the idea altogether. Once Gallard opened his tortured eyes and whispered, “Has he gone?” And Satan understanding, said, “Yes, the man has taken his money and gone.”

The doctor came and did what he could, injecting a little morphia to dull the pain. It was, he told Mrs. Gallard, a very bad case of angina pectoris—the heart was in a deplorable state. He was afraid—— She would not listen; she would rather not hear.

“He was all right this morning,” she said. “I cannot believe it is anything serious.”

Mrs. Thomas arrived and was installed as nurse. Baby Dick was with his ayah, but would Mrs. Gallard mind going over to the Thomases’ house to lie down in the afternoon? Mrs. Thomas would feel happier with some European in the house.

Mrs. Gallard did not mind. She felt rather relieved. Her own immaculate house was haunted by the image of that grim stretched figure, with its twisted face.

It was while Mrs. Gallard was away in the Thomases’ house that the end came for Gallard.

For two hours he lay quietened, numb, under the morphia, then he opened his eyes, and seeing Mrs. Thomas, smiled apologetically.

“The wife resting?” he whispered. “Why did they bother to send for you, Mrs. Thomas?”

His eyes wandered, agony swept across his face, he struggled to a sitting, position. “Pauline!” he shrieked out and fell back dead.

They had tried before the doctor came to take the papers that he held in his hand away from him.

He resisted firmly. “I want to destroy them,” he had whispered. “I’ll do it presently, when I feel better.” He was still holding them when he died.

Romantic-minded Mrs. Thomas, clinging to her husband and weeping, insisted that they should be buried still clutched in the dead man’s hands.

She had jumped to the conclusion that they were love letters that Mrs. Gallard must not see. Dick promised they should be left, and left they were. No one wanted to unclench the dead fingers and take them out, Mrs. Gallard least of all. She did not even wish to see him; hysterically she asserted that it would be better much if she did not. Death terrified her. Harry dead meant nothing to her at all, nothing, nothing!

Had he ever meant anything to her alive, Captain Thomas wondered, and set his face to the wretched business of arranging for the funeral.

Among the P.C.’s papers there was a letter, evidently just recently written, to Sterne. Captain Thomas took that and posted it. He sent one of his own as well.

“Gallard is dead,” he wrote, “died very suddenly after about three hours’ illness. It has been an awful shock to the station. He knew that your affair had come out all right. We had both read of it in the paper the morning that he was taken ill. He was, I know, immensely relieved. He was very fond of you and your wife. Indeed, his thoughts must have been very much with you, for my wife says he called out your wife’s name just before he died.”

Pauline! But there had been two Paulines. Who knows, perhaps, in the end, Gallard’s soul had gone to stand by the soul of the woman he had loved and failed!

Chapter XX

Life’s Magic

The magic of life is the sap that stirs
Deep in the heart of the old, old world,
That blossoms above in the glow of a rose,
That sings on our lips, as love comes—and goes.
The magic of life is a dream, a sigh,
That holds us once ere we come to die.

The Countess heard the reason for Robin’s desertion in a roundabout way from Captain Bude, who was, once more, in regular attendance.

“Fell flop at his feet,” said Captain Bude. “’Pon my soul, most romantic! And the little girl is in love with him, you know. I’m glad it was taken out of my hands.”

“What do you mean?” asked the Countess, stifling a little yawn. “It may all be very romantic, but it is scarcely interesting. He was very dull as a man; as a husband, I should think he’d be insufferable.”

Captain Bude laughed, “You are cross, my dear, because he’s gone back to his charming wife.”

“Charming?” she repeated, her eyes smiled at him. “Did you find her charming too. Bods? “

He nodded, a shade of seriousness swept over his face. “So charming,” he admitted, “that I am glad my hands weren’t allowed to spoil her. She was taken out of them, as I remarked.”

“And you let her go,” she chaffed. “Come, Bods, that wasn’t like you.”

He took her seriously. “I don’t know, if it had been left to me, that I should have let her go,” he answered. “Hence my gladness. Handle a butterfly, ever so gently; and you rub the bloom off its wings.” He shook his shoulders and bent over her, his manner suddenly all ardent. “Besides, it has sent me back to you,” he said. “Isn’t that enough?”

She watched him with mocking eyes. “And I am not a butterfly?” she said. “Or, if I am, all the bloom has been rubbed off my wings. Some time ago, by these or other hands.”

She touched his big hands ever so gently, and he stooped immediately and kissed her fingers. “You, a butterfly!” he laughed. “My God, you are more like the Egyptian Queen of fable. You eat our hearts, Melisande. We don’t so much as get near holding you.”

He knew, anyway, the way to keep her complaisant. To Pauline he wrote:

“Dear Little Dream Lady,

“All the happiness in the world be yours with that husband of yours, though I cannot feel that he deserves you.”

Did he deserve her? That was not for Pauline to say. Did he want her? That she doubted very much. She stayed on in the house, anyway. She was introduced to the neighbourhood as young Mrs. Sterne, she sat at meals between Robin and his mother, drove with Mrs. Sterne through the village, walked with her in the garden. Sometimes the older woman, at the end of a silence that would come between them like a cloud, would put out her hand and, touching Pauline’s, would cling to it as though in desperation.

“It will all come right in time, dear,” she would say. “I know it will. Oh, be patient, Pauline. Just be patient.”

Was she not patient? She took his scorn and hid it in her heart, She met his anger and tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She lived in his silence.

What was he planning? What was he hoping for? Where did he imagine such a state of affairs must end? Mrs. Sterne, senior, wanted badly to give him a good shaking, yet she was afraid. If she tackled him, might he not pull down the whole ramshackle concern about their ears? And, really, she still hoped for peace. Patience, as she had proved when he was a baby, was the only way to tackle Robin in one of his obstinate fits.

“It is just obstinacy,” she confided to Pauline one day. “He has been in the wrong, and he won’t admit it. He loves you, and he cannot bring himself to say so. Because he thinks his love is a weakness that he should have been able to destroy.”

“I think he has destroyed it,” said Pauline. “There is nothing but hate left.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear, don’t say that, don’t feel it,” pleaded Mrs. Sterne. “Only have patience just a little longer.”

“In a month,” said Pauline, she stood by the drawing-room window looking out into the garden; she was noticing, even as she spoke, that already summer was over, autumn was getting in her sheaf of red leaves and dead flowers; “in a month from to-day he will be gone.” She turned to look at her mother-in-law. “Do you think I can go on living in his house, taking his money, pretending to be his wife, for always?”

“You are my daughter,” said Mrs. Sterne softly. “I have always so wanted to have a daughter. Does the position irk you too much, Pauline?”

“Ah, no, no!” said Pauline. “But listen, Mother—I can call you that. I don’t think my own mother will be jealous. She left me, you know, when I was four—he hurts me. His eyes hurt me in their hardness, his silence hurts me with its hate. I would rather creep away somewhere and hide, where he need never see me again, never know what I am doing; he hurts me so, Mother, and I—I love him.”

She hid her face in swift tears and Mrs. Sterne sat touching the down-bent head.

“I must see what I can do,” she whispered to herself. “We’ve been patient with Robin long enough.”

So that evening, after dinner, when the three of them had sat and made polite conversation for the servants’ benefit, and after Pauline had said her low good nights and gone from the room, Mrs. Sterne, looking up at her son’s figure where it stood against the fireplace, took her courage in both hands, and plunged, as she afterwards described it.

“Robin,” she said, “how long do you propose going on being so extremely disagreeable?”

It seemed that she plunged her words into a heavy silence that would never break. She could see that he bent his head a little forward, both hands on the mantelpiece, as though he stared at the fire. The first fire they had had that year, generally such a nice cheerful thing! Really, Robin was worse than tiresome. She must have spoilt him as a boy.

Since he made no answer, and, apparently, intended to make none, she rose presently and stood beside him, putting a hand on his arm.

“Robin,” she said, and she was suddenly really horrified to see that he was crying, a man’s hard, difficult tears.

Everything else was forgotten. He was once more her baby. Hurt, never mind if it was by his own fault, asking for comfort!

“Robin,” she whispered again, and put her arms right round him, hugging him to her heart.

A ridiculous position for anyone to have found them in. Robin realized that first, freeing himself, rubbing his eyes with hard hands, ready, at all costs, to deny the tears.

“I am a damned fool,” he said gruffly, “but I am also miserably unhappy, and it hurts that you don’t understand.”

“Understand, dear?” said Mrs. Sterne meekly. “I try so hard to. But what is it you want? First you must divorce Pauline at all costs. Then nothing would persuade you to. We don’t know, she and I, what it is you do want. You said you wanted her here, and she came; and now you don’t seem able to stand the sight of her.”

“I love her,” he said morosely, “and she hates the sight of me.”

“Oh, my dear, my dear, she does not,” said Mrs. Sterne. She sat back in her chair. “Now, listen, Robin, dear one, just once. Perhaps, it will hurt, what I say, but, sometimes, even our biggest love does not keep the hurt away from our words. Your love for Pauline, when she hurt you, turned to anger. Son of mine, there was a good deal of self-love in that. You would not listen to what I had to say. She had done wrong, but she loved you. Real love would have listened to that plea. Oh, I know men and women love differently. Perhaps, I couldn’t quite hope to understand you. Yet, when you told me you had changed your mind, my heart leapt with joy. I think Pauline’s did too. She came, a-flutter with hope. You had forgiven her. Why did you send for her, Robin?”

He hung his head. He was very much like a boy found out in some wrong doing,

“I was jealous,” he admitted. “I could not let her go.”

“It seems to me, Robin,” said Mrs. Sterne, trying to make her voice as severe as possible, for her heart was in reality still melted by the memory of his tears, “that it is you who owe Pauline an apology.”

“She has never said she loved me,” Robin argued, “never shown it. I am going away in a month. You and she will be happy together, without me here to spoil it all.”

“Dear lad,” said Mrs. Sterne, “come nearer to me. Put aside all this stiffness. Let me feel that you are my baby again, to whom I can give a little advice. Suppose you were to go to Pauline, suppose you were just to say to her, ‘I love you, Pauline. Can you love me?’ It is what you have never said to her as yet, have you?”

He did not answer. She could see him standing there, the firelight outlining his face, his clenched hands.

“Pauline has gone out to post some letters,” Mrs. Sterne went on softly. “She’ll come back through the garden. Look, Robin, how quiet and still the garden is. There’s a harvest moon to-night.”

He looked up at her, smiling a little grimly.

“You think all that sounds tempting?” he said.

Mrs. Sterne laughed, more cheerfully than she had been able to laugh for weeks. Then, rising and standing beside him, she put her arms round his neck again.

“I’m old,” she whispered. “But I have been young. There has been a harvest moon in my life, too, Robin.”

He stooped, quickly, and kissed her. “I’ll go,” he said. “We’ll see what your charm does for me, Mother.”

Yet it seemed as though all the magic of the garden, and magical it certainly was, was going to do nothing for him. His greeting to Pauline was stiffly awkward, and he stood aside, on the path to let her pass.

“You have been to the post,” he said gruffly. “Why didn’t you ask me to take the letters for you?”

Pauline paused and looked back at him, head a little tilted, eyes, he thought, like stars in the soft dusk of her face. He so rarely addressed a personal remark to her that she was surprised.

“Why,” she said shyly, “it is so lovely out. I come nearly every night when it is fine.”

“Every night,” he repeated, and seemed to be content to leave the matter there. So that, for a second or two, they stood, not looking at each other, yet both vividly awake to the other’s nearness.

Then at last:

“Good night,” said Pauline, the word almost a sigh, and turned to go.

Was he going to stand and watch her? Let her go? A little breeze rustled through the garden, laden with faint protest, the trees shivered, the flowers sighed in their sleep. All the beauty of nature stood on tip-toe and strove to push this unwilling mortal to his bliss.

“Pauline,” whispered Robin. “Pauline!”

She stood still at once, waiting for him, and in two steps he was at her side. “Pauline,” he said again, and caught her hands against his heart.

The little breeze laughed as it stole away. The flowers smiled and nodded in their dreams. The trees stood still and silent, pointing to the stars. For, once more, love had conquered, stooping from her throne to give to two mortals the joy that lies hidden in the heart of the world.

What need for words, explanations, forgiveness, or remorse?

All the path of life and all its bliss;
All, every blossom that blows,
All the scent of the rose,
I will give it back in one long kiss.

The End