“‘As for Brydon, he had a narrow squeak, he’s out of the bush now, but as weak as a rat. On the whole the sand flies are worse than the fever. Don’t dwell on this touch of fever to Gwen, it’s really of no consequence, but it’s an awful nuisance on account of the delay. From here we go on to a place about a hundred miles off, to where we have traced Broad. Hitherto the blacks have been friendly but beyond the hills I hear we are to look out for squalls. Don’t expect many letters after this, as the modes of conveyance are very casual and untrustworthy, neither can I count upon receiving our letters safely. I will hurry there and back with all possible speed. I know you will always see Gwen at least once a day.’ “See, John, I can hardly read it, what is it? Oh, ‘love for you’ and something for the rector I can hardly read.” “We will go in on our way to the market; the ponies are at the door.” Gwen was in her boudoir when Mrs. Fellowes went to her. She was sitting with a bundle of papers in her hand. She thrust them into a drawer, and ran and as it were got into the other woman’s arms, and lay there with a short audible movement of pain. “Tell me just how you think my husband is,” she said. Mrs. Fellowes started. “Ah, you’re afraid too!” cried Gwen. “Gwen, I know really very little; those attacks are always very sharp, hardly ever dangerous except with bad constitutions, John says—he has been reading up a medical book about African fevers.” “‘Bad constitutions and complications,’ the book says, I have it; and he has a complication in some sort of sunstroke.” “Gwen!” “Yes,” she went on in a quiet level voice. “He missed the last mail by some idiocy of the blacks, and he walked ten miles all through a swamp to catch it, with the fever still on him; when he got home he was half delirious. He lay and it seems turned his heart inside out, both audibly and on paper, see, I have it all here in these sheets!” she said, with bitter irony, catching her breath, as she took them out of the drawer. “Gwen, my Gwen, what do you mean?” “I mean he lay there and told out into words—blatant awful English words—on to these sheets, how he loves me, me! but in words no other man ever before used, or dared to use, or the soul of every loved woman would have been annihilated long ago, they are not fitted to bear such magnificent burdens!—He told, too, in precisely the same uncompromising way what he wants of me, and what he considers I am capable of in this line. Mrs. Fellowes, I know just exactly what it cost him to go away! Nothing is hid. Then yesterday—” She stood up rather wildly—