"In the morning they took me down to the river. At this point it widens into a _kongo_, or pool, and it was here, they told me, that the crocodile mostly lived, subsisting on the native oxen--the short-horned _jongos_--which, swept away by the current while crossing the ford above, were carried down on the _longos_, or rapids. It was not, however, till the second evening that I managed to catch sight of his ugly snout above the surface. I waited around, and on the third day I saw him suddenly come out of the water and heave his whole length on to a sandbank in mid-stream and go to sleep in the sun. He was certainly a monster--fully thirty--you have never been in Central Africa, have you, Miss Weston? No? You ought to go there!--fully fifty feet from tip to tail. There he lay, glistening. I shall never forget the sight." He broke off to light a cigarette. I heard Betty draw in her breath sharply. Mortimer was beaming through his glasses with the air of the owner of a dog which is astonishing a drawing-room with its clever tricks. "And what did you do then, Mr. Denton?" asked Betty, breathlessly. "Yes, what did you do then, old chap?" said Mortimer. Denton blew out the match and dropped it on the ash-tray. "Eh? Oh," he said, carelessly, "I swam across and shot him." "Swam across and shot him!" "Yes. It seemed to me that the chance was too good to be missed. Of course, I might have had a pot at him from the bank, but the chances were I wouldn't have hit him in a vital place. So I swam across to the sandbank, put the muzzle of my gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. I have rarely seen a crocodile so taken aback." "But how dreadfully dangerous!" "Oh, danger!" Eddie Denton laughed lightly. "One drops into the habit of taking a few risks out there, you know. Talking of _danger_, the time when things really did look a little nasty was when the wounded _gongo_ cornered me in a narrow _tongo_ and I only had a pocket-knife with everything in it broken except the corkscrew and the thing for taking stones out of horses' hoofs. It was like this----" I could bear no more. I am a tender-hearted man, and I made some excuse and got away. From the expression on the girl's face I could see that it was only a question of days before she gave her heart to this romantic newcomer. * * * * * As a matter of fact, it was on the following afternoon that she called on me and told me that the worst had happened. I had known her from a child, you understand, and she always confided her troubles to me. "I want your advice," she began. "I'm so wretched!"