The crisis was past; and if Jack knew it, so also did Jocelyn. She knew that the imperturbable gentlemanliness of the Englishman had conveyed to the more passionate West Indian the simple, downright fact that in a lady's drawing-room there was to be no raised voice, no itching fingers, no flash of fiery eyes. “Yes,” he said, “that will suit me splendidly. We will travel together.” He turned to Jocelyn. “I hear your brother is away?” “Yes, for a few days. He has gone up the coast.” Then there was a silence. They both paused, helping each other as if by pre-arrangement, and Victor Durnovo suddenly felt that he must go. He rose, and picked up the whip which he had dropped on the matting. There was no help for it--the united wills of these two people were too strong for him. Jack Meredith passed out of the verandah with him, murmuring something about giving him a leg up. While they were walking round the house, Victor Durnovo made one of those hideous mistakes which one remembers all through life with a sudden rush of warm shame and self-contempt. The very thing that was uppermost in his mind to be avoided suddenly bubbled to his lips, almost, it would seem, in defiance of his own will. “What about the small--the small-pox?” he asked. “We have got it under,” replied Jack quietly. “We had a very bad time for three days, but we got all the cases isolated and prevented it from spreading. Of course, we could do little or nothing to save them; they died.” Durnovo had the air of a whipped dog. His mind was a blank. He simply had nothing to say; the humiliation of utter self-contempt was his. “You need not be afraid to come back now,” Jack Meredith went on, with a strange refinement of cruelty. And that was all he ever said about it. “Will it be convenient for you to meet me on the beach at four o'clock this afternoon?” he asked, when Durnovo was in the saddle. “Yes.” “All right--four o'clock.” He turned and deliberately went back to the bungalow. There are some friendships where the intercourse is only the seed which absence duly germinates. Jocelyn Gordon and Jack had parted as acquaintances; they met as friends. There is no explaining these things, for there is no gauging the depths of the human mind. There is no getting down to the little bond that lies at the bottom of the well--the bond of sympathy. There is no knowing what it is that prompts us to say, “This man, or this woman, of all the millions, shall be my friend.” “I am sorry,” he said, “that he should have had a chance of causing you uneasiness again.” Jocelyn remembered that all her life. She remembers still--and Africa has slipped away from her existence for ever. It is one of the mental photographs of her memory, standing out clear and strong amidst a host of minor recollections. CHAPTER XVIII. A REQUEST It surely was my profit had I known It would have been my pleasure had I seen. “Why did he come back?”