“Suddenly, letters had ceased to come. There had been a horrid interval of months when there was no word out of Africa for her. Cablegrams were unanswered. The people at the other end must have been very unbusinesslike not to give her some inkling of the reason why they couldn’t deliver them. I suppose it was the uncertainty. There he was, up on the verge of Rhodesia or beyond, prospecting, surveying, exploring: it was quite on the cards that he should lose his way, or be infinitely delayed, or fail somehow of his communications with headquarters on the coast. Beastly months for her, anyhow! Then letters did come. I never saw any of them, but I can imagine just the awkward vocabulary of them: a Portuguese head clerk in Mozambique trying to break it to her ornately that her man had died of fever up-country. Can’t you imagine those letters--in quaint, bad English, on thin paper, worn to utter limpness and poverty with being clutched and carried and cried over? I never saw them, but I can. “Well--I don’t need to go into it all. Indeed, there were many details that Madame C. had forgotten, and that she naturally couldn’t ask the girl to refresh her memory of for my benefit. What was troubling Madame was the girl’s condition. Apparently, she had loved the man consumingly, and considered herself virtually dead--entirely negligible at least, as pitiful and worthless a thing as a child-widow in India. But you’ve noticed, perhaps, that the very humble are sometimes positively overweening about some special thing. The damned worms _won’t_ turn--any more than if they were elephants in the path! And so it was with her. “She was determined to go out and fetch his body home. The people in Mozambique had to confess that they didn’t know where those sacred remains were. The epidemic had run through the little camp, and, by the time the man himself had keeled over, the few natives that were left hadn’t nerve enough to do anything for him. They remembered him, raving with fever and dropping among the corpses. A few, who were not already stricken, got away--probably considering that there was a lively curse on his immediate neighborhood. There had been complete demoralization. A few of them had eventually strayed back, as I said, joining any one who would take them home. Their casual employments delayed them a good deal, and by the time they turned in a report--to use formal language in a case where it is a sore misfit--there was nothing to be done. I didn’t get this from Madame C.; I got it from her, later, when she told me everything she knew about it. But I put it in here, which is, after all, where it belongs.”