Then he dropped her hands, and walked to the window, standing with his back to it and his head slightly bowed. “It was a terrible shock to me to hear what happened; and to think that the same paper that contained an account of my safety told of his death! To think that within a couple of months we might have been together! My God! When I think that but for an idiotic man falling ill when we were within a month's journey of the lake--a man whose life was worth nothing--I might have been here--at his side--to stand between him and danger!” He began pacing the room, his hands clenched fiercely and the fire of his eyes becoming more intense. She sat there without a word, watching him. Her eyes followed him up and down the room. He stopped suddenly opposite to her. “It was the cruellest thing ever done on earth!” he cried. “Call it Fate or Destiny or the will of Heaven--whatever you please--I say it was the cruellest thing that ever happened! Why could not he have been spared for a couple of months--until I had seen him--until he had known that I was safe--that I had done more in the way of discovery than I set out to do? But to think that he was killed just the day before--perhaps only an hour before, the news of my safety arrived in England!--it maddens me--it maddens me! I feel that it would be better for me to have remained lost for ever than to return to this. I feel that all that fierce struggle for years--the struggle with those savages, with the climate, the malaria, the agues, the diseases which exist in that awful place but nowhere else in the world--I feel that all that struggle was in vain--that it would be better if I had given in at once--if I had sent a bullet through my head and ended it all I Where is your brother? He was with him on that fatal evening. Why did he go away before he had seen me and told me all that there was to tell about my poor Dick?” Still she was silent. What answer could she make to such wild questions?