She made him talk of his adventures, and he obeyed her, partly to help her in the struggle he perceived, partly because in the position--beneath and beyond all hope--to which she had reduced him, it was the only way by which he could save anything out of the wreck. And she bravely responded. She could and did lend him enough of her mind to make it worth his while. A friend should not come home to her from perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful--a niggard of sympathy and praise. So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little of what had--what must have--occurred. Diana, carved in white wax, but for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was listening to a description of an English embassy sent through the length and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria. The embassy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids. The road it marched by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves--had been so strewn probably for thousands of years. "One night my horse trod unawares on two skeletons--women--locked in each other's arms," said Hugh; "scores of others round them. In the evening we camped at a village where every able-bodied male had been killed the year before." "Shot?" asked the doctor. "Oh, dear, no! That would have been to waste ammunition. A limb was hacked off, and they bled to death." His mother was looking at the speaker with all her eyes, but she did not hear a word he said. Was he pale or not? Diana shuddered. "And that is _stopped_--forever?" Her eyes were on the speaker. "As long as our flag flies there," said the soldier, simply. Her look kindled. For a moment she was the shadow, the beautiful shadow, of her old Imperialist self--the proud, disinterested lover of her country. The doctor shook his head. "Don't forget the gin, and the gin-traders on the other side, Master Hugh." "They don't show their noses in the new provinces," said the young man, quietly; "we shall straighten that out too, in the long run--you'll see." But Diana had ceased to listen. Mrs. Roughsedge, turning toward her, and with increasing foreboding, saw, as it were, the cloud of an inward agony, suddenly recalled, creep upon the fleeting brightness of her look, as the evening shade mounts upon and captures a sunlit hill-side. The mother, in spite of her native optimism, had never cherished any real hope of her son's success. But neither had she expected, on the other side, a certainty so immediate and so unqualified. She saw before her no settled or resigned grief. The Tallyn tragedy had transformed what had been almost a recovered serenity, a restored and patient equilibrium, into something violent, tumultuous, unstable--prophesying action. But what--poor child!--could the action be? * * * * *