'I am writing to her, though she gave me no hope.' 'No hope--_you_--why?' 'She quite misunderstands the real love I bear her, and evidently suspects that I wish to secure her hand, not because I am the squire of Wilmothurst, but because she is in reality the heiress of it.' 'She--what riddle is this?' asked Dalton, taking the cigar from his lips, and eyeing his friend. 'Did I not make you understand all that before, old fellow?' 'Not quite.' 'Well, old Chevenix has no end of mortgages over my inheritance--it is well nigh all his property now; I can't even pay the interest--the mater cannot realise how heavily the old place is burdened, and what a task my father had to keep it together--so times there are when I don't care if I should be knocked on the head--bowled out here.' 'Don't talk that way, Jerry,' said the older man, reprehensively; 'death is too close to be lightly spoken of thus.' Death was indeed closer than either perhaps thought. 'But there is your mother,' urged Dalton, after a pause. 'She! It wouldn't break her "noble" heart, even were it so with me, and I were lying stiff, as hundreds are now, in yonder bush,' replied Jerry, with an irrepressible gust of bitterness, as he snipped the end off a cigar with his teeth, and, lighting it, proceeded to smoke, silently and sorrowfully, while re-charging his revolver for the coming attack; 'though, if we are to believe the newspapers, the grief of the "upper ten," like that of royalty, is something unfathomable as compared with that of any of the vulgar herd!' CHAPTER II. THE SCARABŒUS. Before the troops, on the side of a large, rocky hill, and in the red fiery light of the setting sun, setting in a sky where it flamed like a vast crimson globe amid an orange and amber space that blended into green and blue overhead, lay Coomassie, with all its long spacious streets of wigwam-like houses, built of wattlework and mud, plastered and washed with white clay, ornamented with rows of beautiful banyan trees, and having before the door of each dwelling a special tree, at the foot of which were placed idols, calabashes, and human bones, as fetishes for protection against evil. It was four miles in circumference, and its most important edifice was the palace from which King Koffee had fled--a central stone building of European architecture, in the chief thoroughfare, so spacious that it included two or three small streets, besides piazzas for the royal recreation, with arcades of bamboo, the bases of which were ornamented with elegant trellis work of an Egyptian character. The accommodation was most ample, as befitted a monarch whom the State required to possess 3333 wives.