“I can’t stand that sort of thing,” she said, “I told you I had got maudlin. Treat me as you would a nice orthodox Christian widow, who wears crêpe and caps and gets just to the proper state of thinness, pulling herself up, however, just short of scragginess like a self-respecting creature. And now we must hurry, for I hear the carriage.” She turned round as she was leaving the room, and laughed. “I am altogether losing tone. Do you know that young Will Dyer—Sir William’s black sheep, whom I have been occupying my spare moments in being a mother to, and in trying to detach from the devil—began yesterday to make violent love to me?” “I don’t wonder!” “Good gracious me, why?” “Look at your face! You are a woman now, my good Gwen.” “And is this the first result? God help us! Is my one pride in life to become a thorn in my flesh?” “That’s as you take it! It will, unless you are careful, be a very considerable thorn in other people’s. Good gracious, child, why even virtue in women is very much a matter of temperament, and where the temperament is, there will the opportunities be gathered together.” CHAPTER XLIII. LATE one afternoon, two men, looking unspeakably battered, got into a fly at a small off station and told the man to drive them to Strange Hall. “I’ll not show to a soul for a week,” said the first man, who, if one looked at him microscopically, seemed like the remains of Strange, “never in all my life have I felt so humiliated. To be held by the leg by a parcel of niggers for the best part of four months, and at my age, is too much for any fellow.” “You were next to off your head most of the time, and then only for us you’d have escaped long ago,” said Brydon. “Don’t try to find excuses, it’s too damnable altogether, and to think after all that those idiots got home months sooner, laden with ivory!” “After the week what will you do?” asked the other looking out of the window. “You’ll show yourself to your people directly you are presentable, I suppose?” “Give interviews to reporters probably,” he returned shortly. Brydon furtively watched the gaunt shattered man, old before his time, who not so very long before had looked as if he could move the world. “Oh, that woman!” he thought savagely. Almost in spite of himself he had become the keeper of all the elder man’s secrets, and the office weighed frightfully on him. By some extraordinary mischance, neither the letters sent at that time, nor the cablegram, ever reached Strange; they came some time after the expedition had gone, and in transmission were lost, and the negligent messengers thought best to entirely deny the existence of any.