She and God knew what those years had been--the years that had robbed her of her youth, that had planted those grey hairs where the soft brown had been. All the past seemed unfolded in front of her like a scroll. She thought of her parting from her lover on that chill October day, when every breeze sent the leaves flying in crisp flakes through the air. Not a tear did she shed while she was saying that farewell to him. She had carried herself bravely--yes, as she stood beside the privet hedge and waved her hand to him on the road on which he was driving to catch the train; but when she had returned to the house and her father had put his arm round her, she was not quite so self-possessed. Her tears came in a torrent all at once, and she cried out for him to come back to her. He had not come back to her. Through the long desolate years that had been her cry; but he had not come back to her. Oh! the desolation of those years that followed! At first she had received many letters from him. So long as he was in touch with some form of civilisation, however rudimentary it was, he had written to her; but then the letters became few and irregular. He could only trust that one out of every six that he wrote would reach her, he said, for he only wrote on the chance of meeting an elephant-hunter or a slave-raider going to the coast who would take a letter for him--for a consideration. She had not the least objection to receive a letter, even though it had been posted by the red hand of the half-caste slave-raider. But afterwards the letters ceased altogether. She tried to find courage in the reflection that the rascally men who had been entrusted with the letters had flung them away, or perhaps they had been killed or had died naturally before reaching the coast. Only for a time did she find some comfort in thus accounting for the absence of all news regarding him. At the end of a year she read in a newspaper an article in which the writer assumed that all hope for the safety of Claude Westwood had been abandoned. The writer of the article was clearly an expert in African exploration. He was ready to quote instance after instance since the days of Hanno, of explorers who had dared too much and had been cut off--some by what he called the legitimate enemies of pioneers, namely, disease and privation, others by that cruelty which has its habitation in the dark places of the earth, and nowhere in greater abundance than in the dark places of the Dark Continent.