Worst of all was life in the isolated lonely house on his coffee and rubber plantation, where for months on end she would never see a white face but his, and for weeks on end, when he was away on his mysterious affairs, no white face at all. . . . And at the bottom of his compound were _bandas_, grass huts, in an enclosure, wherein dwelt native women. . . . One night, in the year 1914, she sat alone in the silent lonely house, thinking of her daughter Eva at Cheltenham, of her happy, if hapless, girlhood in her father’s house, of her brief married life with an honourable English gentleman (oh, the contrast!), and wondering how much longer she could bear her punishment. . . Suddenly and noiselessly appeared in the verandah her husband’s chief factotum, head house-boy, and familiar, one Murad, an Arab-Swahili, whom she feared and detested. “_Bwana_ coming,” said he shortly, and as noiselessly disappeared. Going out on to the verandah, she saw her husband and a few “boys” (gun-bearers, porters, and servants) coming through the garden. It was seven weeks since she had seen or heard anything of him. “Pack,” was his greeting, “at once. You start on _safari_ to the railway as soon as possible, or sooner. You are going to Mombasa. I have cabled to Eva to come out by the next boat. . . . P. and O. to Aden, and thence to Mombasa. . . . She should be here in three weeks or so . . .” and he went off to bath and change. At dinner he informed her that she was to settle at Mombasa with Eva, make as many new friends as possible, entertain, and generally be the most English of English matrons with the most English of English daughters—the latter fresh from boarding-school in England. . . . Dear old Charlie Stayne-Brooker, it was to be known, had gone to Bukoba, to the wonderful sleeping-sickness hospital, for diagnosis of an illness. Nothing serious, really, of course—but one couldn’t be too careful when one had trouble with the glands of the neck, and certain other symptoms, after spending some time in that beastly tsetse-fly country. . . . She was to give the impression that he had made light of it, and quite “taken her in”—wouldn’t dream of allowing his wife and daughter to go up there. People were to form the opinion that poor old Charlie might be in a worse way than his wife imagined.