But then she recollected the story she had heard of the true lover who loved so well that the gods had given to him the greatest gift in their power--the gift of blindness, so that at the end of forty years when he and the woman he loved had grown old together, she still seemed to him the girl she had been on the first day that he had seen and loved her. There would be nothing grotesque in that lover calling his wife by the love-name of her-youth. But would such love blindness be given to Claude, so that he should still think of her as the slim girl with the loose hair? Alas! Alas! He might tolerate the letter signed as she had signed it, but in a few months he would be face to face with her, and would he not see that she was no longer a girl? Only for a moment she paused as that melancholy question passed through her mind. Then she flung down the letter, crying: “I will trust him. I will trust him as I have trusted him hitherto. He will love me better, better, better, seeing that it was the years of waiting for him that gave me the grey hairs where only brown had been.” It never occurred to her to ask herself if it was not possible that the years which had given her half a dozen grey hairs, had brought about quite as great a change in her lover. It never occurred to her to think that there was a possibility that the years spent among savages--wandering through the forests where malaria lurked--starving at times and in peril of beasts and reptiles and lightning and sunstroke every day of his life, had changed him in some measure--even in as great a measure as the years of watching and waiting had altered her. His portrait stood by her side day and night. Every day and every night she had kissed that picture of the young cavalry officer that smiled out at her from the frame. That was the portrait of her lover, and never for a moment did she think of him as otherwise than that portrait revealed him to her. So she had posted the first of her new series of love-letters to him with no great heaviness of heart; and then there began for her a fresh period of waiting; for she knew that some months must elapse before her letters could reach him, and after that an equal space before she could receive his reply. But the barley crop had only been reaped in the golden fields of Brackenshire when Mr. Westwood's lawyer brought her a telegram which he had just received from Zanzibar. It was not from Claude, but from a doctor whose name she frequently heard in connection with the exploration of Africa. “Westwood arrived here to-day from Uganda, overcome with fatigue, not serious. Leaves for England, probably fortnight.”