* * * * * The mail-boat called as usual at Las Palmas and was boarded on arrival by the usual batch of invalids and Liverpool trippers for the run home. Carter landed as soon as the port doctor gave clearance papers, rowed to the mole and chartered a tartana, between whose shafts there drooped a mouse-colored mule. In it he bumped over the badly laid tram lines from the Isleta to the city, and then left the city by the Telde road. Las Palmas is the meeting place of all West Africa, and if one is there long enough, one expects to meet sooner or later every man who has business or other interests on the Coast. Carter waved his hand to a Haûsa constabulary officer in the gateway of the Catalina, and to a Lagos branch boat skipper who was standing on the steps of the Elder Dempster office. Coming down from the telegraph station he saw one of the Germans who had been frightened out of Mokki, and under a café awning by the dry river bed no less a personage than Burgoyne of Monk River waved a hospitable hand and invited him to try a glass of Bass. But further on, where the Telde road leaves the city, he saw a man whose walk he knew, and instinctively leaned out from the tartana's awning to show himself, and to wave a greeting. The man was Cascaes. But the Senhor Cascaes stared him coolly in the face, and--cut him dead. The tartana rattled on, and Carter nodded after the Portuguese thoughtfully. "You have always hated me pretty tenderly," he mused. "I wonder why. I've hammered you a dozen times, but it's only been in the ordinary way of business, and what any half-baked Portuguese has got to expect. You surely can't be up against me for that." Laura was not living in the convent, but lodged in the house of a banana farmer just beyond. Carter found her in the garden. She was sitting on the end of a bench overhung with great lavender clots of wistaria at one end and shaded by a purple mass of bougainvillea at the other. He noted with a queer thrill that there was something cold in the outward form of her greeting. She returned his kiss accurately enough, but without enthusiasm. Still, from the moment she saw him, the light came into her eyes that he had grown to know so well. The two things did not seem somehow or other to tally. Carter sat himself on the bench and took a good hold on his nerves. Then he slid an arm round her waist and drew her to him. "Well," he said, "out with it. What's the trouble?" She dropped her head on his shoulder contentedly enough. "Oh, the usual. When you're away from me, dear, I never feel quite certain if I ought to marry you." "Now, that's awkward, isn't it? But as I have been up country colloguing with your other suitor, old Kallee, you couldn't very well have been with me there." "I wish you hadn't gone."