It was the middle of the morning. Laurence Stanninghame, striving to kill the few hours remaining to him on African soil, was strolling listlessly along Adderley Street. A shop window, adorned with photographic views of local scenery and types of natives,--mostly store-boys rigged up with shield and assegai to look warlike for the occasion,--attracted his attention, and for a while he stood, idly gazing at these. His survey ended, he backed away from the window in a perfectly irrational and British manner on a busy thoroughfare, and--trod hard on somebody's toes. A little cry of mingled pain and resentment, then he stood--profusely apologizing. But with the first tones of his voice, she whom he had so awkwardly, if unintentionally damaged, seemed to lose sight of her injuries. Her face blanched, but not with physical pain, her lips parted in a sort of gasp, and the sweet eyes, wide and dilated, sought his in wonder--almost in fear. "Laurence!" The name was hardly audible, but he heard it. And if his steely philosophy had stood him in good stead before, assuredly at this moment his guard was down; as he recognized that he had last beheld this serene vision of loveliness, arrayed as now in cool white, strained to him in farewell embrace alone in the solemn night, those parted lips pressed to his in heart-wrung pain, those sweet eyes, starry, humid with love, gazing full into his own. And now they met again, four years later--by chance--in a busy thoroughfare. "Pray excuse my inexcusable awkwardness; I must have hurt you," he said, as they clasped hands, and the tone was even almost formal, for he remembered they were in public. "You--you--have changed. I should hardly have known you but for your voice," she said unsteadily--for he had turned to walk up the street with her. "But--when did you return? I--had not heard." "Had you not? I called on your aunt in Johannesburg on the way through. She was telling me all about you." Something of relief seemed to manifest itself in Lilith's tone as she rejoined: "But you--are you staying here?" "Well, no. I have been trying to kill time until this afternoon. I am leaving by the _Alnwick Castle_." "Oh! By the _Alnwick Castle_?" she repeated again--and in the catch in her voice, and the quickness of utterance, he knew she was talking at random, for the sake of saying something, in fact. "Do you care to hear a little of what has befallen me since I went?" he said. "Then let us turn in here," as she made a mute but eager gesture of assent. They had gained the entrance to the oak avenue at the back of Government House. Strolling up this, they turned into the beautiful Botanical Gardens. Nobody was about, save a gardener or two busied with their work.