Perhaps she was. Why should one sneer at a woman for trying to improve her position and looks and wriggle into a less sordid sphere than that in which she was brought up? Emilia Standish—christened Emily, of course, but wrote her name "Emilia" from the time she was seventeen—was, as Captain Brentham ill-naturedly guessed, the daughter of a Bayswater widow who kept a Bayswater boarding-house (few districts of London have such a power for moulding human beings to its guise). Emilia Standish—or was it Stapleton?—I really forget—had tried life as a governess with ill success. She confided to her mother, and her mother only, that she might have succeeded here or there had not her pupil’s father made improper advances from which she had to flee. She had studied for the stage, but like her predestined fate, Spencer Bazzard, she, at thirty-two, was somewhat at a loose end and living at home when Spencer came to lodge at her mother’s boarding-house. He was down on his luck, almost in hiding, nearly cast off by his highly respectable, much older brother. He fell ill. Emilia took pity on him, nursed him, and defied her mother over the financial question. Out of gratitude he proposed. She accepted him and took stock of the situation, called on the elder brother in Staple Inn, secured his advocacy for a "colonial" appointment—and—you know the rest. Spencer can’t have been wholly bad, because though they had many a private tiff and unheard wrangle, this woman stuck by him and made a career for him. Brentham, in writing to his sister, gave too unfair a description of Spencer. He omitted to notice that though his knowledge of law was so imperfect as to throw doubt on the efficacy of the examinations which then admitted to the Bar, he had at any rate acquired some knowledge of shorthand, and certain of the qualities necessary to playing private secretary to an important personage. So that Sir Godfrey preferred greatly the retention of Bazzard as his lieutenant at Unguja, rather than the slightly gloomy and excessively well-informed Brentham. There came at this time rumour after rumour that the Arabs of the Zangian coast were preparing to rise in force not only against the Germans but against all white men. They were concerting measures in common with the Arabs of Mombasa, of Tanganyika, Nyasa and the Upper Congo to expel all white men from East Africa and found a great Slave-holding empire which might link up with the victoriously anti-European Mahdi of the Sudan. Sir Godfrey Dewburn did not clothe his Memorandum of instructions to Brentham in exactly these comprehensive and grandiloquent terms, derived from a contemporaneous essay of my own, but he said: