her lazily while she sewed. She felt like a happy young mother making a dainty garment for her baby.

So peaceful and preoccupied was she that Mrs Cork, coming suddenly round a corner, was upon her before she was aware. She caught the treasure up in her clenched hand, but not before the shrewd eye of the other had spied it out.

“But how lovely!” she cried. “What is it?”

“Only a little pink topaz of mine,” said Loree calmly, and held it fast and hidden. But her heart beat wildly and her cheek was pinker than any topaz ever found on an island in the Red Sea.

“Ah,” said Valeria Cork, “I’ve never seen a pink topaz close enough to really examine it.”

This was a plain hint, but Loree sewed furiously, her left hand clutching both stone and silk.

“And what is the little bag for?”

Without hesitation Loree answered firmly.

“To wear a piece of camphor in round my neck.”

“But there is no epidemic about, is there?”

“No: it’s just a superstition of mine.”

Brusquely she rose, stuffing sewing and stone into her pocket. She glanced at her inquisitor coldly. We usually dislike people to whom we are obliged to lie.

“How dreadfully ill you look!” she remarked, with an accent on the “dreadfully.” A faint colour came into the elder woman’s cheek. She had looked upon the face of forty, and to-day the fact was painfully revealed. The contrast between herself and the girl in all the bloom and heyday of youth was striking.

“Bad heads take time to get over,” she said curtly, “and it is stuffy in one’s room.”

“Ah yes. Where is your room?” asked Loree eagerly. Anything to get away from the subject of topazes and camphor-bags.

“On the hot side of the hotel,” said Mrs Cork dryly. “We can’t all afford the best side, like you.”

This was the first time Loree had heard of a best or worst side but not the first time it had been brought home to her that, where she was concerned, Pat never considered the best too good.

“I should have come round to you last night if I had known where your room was,” she said thoughtlessly.

Valeria Cork looked surprised.

“Why? Did you need anything?”

“Only to borrow an aspirin tablet,” said Loree, looking sweet and pure and good, and as though she had never told a lie in her life. And, in fact, until this morning, lying had not been among her accomplishments.

“You had better come round now; then you will know where I am if you want me any time,” suggested the other, and they strolled idly round the balcony. There was no one about except a negro flicking dust from chairs and glancing with sleepy black eyes into the open bedrooms as he passed.

Mrs Cork’s room was indeed tiny, and not to be compared with Loree’s for comfort. She proffered cigarettes and gave her visitor the most comfortable chair. There were beautiful ivory articles on the dressing-table, but they were yellow from use and the monograms faded. The silk wrapper she was wearing had a faded loveliness, too. All her possessions wore an air of yesterday, as of things bought in prosperity and never renewed. The only up-to-date object was a photograph of a hopeful-looking boy in his teens. On inquiry, Loree discovered that this was her only son, and was vaguely surprised to hear the name of the public school he was at—one of the most expensive in England. He had his mother’s handsome eyes, but not their haggard glance.

The two women gossiped awhile, then Loree rose, saying she must dress for luncheon. Mrs Cork announced her intentions of lying down again, as her headache was returning.

In her bedroom, Loree hastened to finish the little bag and place her treasure in it. When it lay in her warm bosom, she felt excited yet curiously content. The prickle of it against her skin was as pleasing to her as the rasp of his hair shirt to the saintly hermit. She went down to lunch in a kind of dream of joy. Quelch was not there. He always lunched at his club. There were but few people about, and those casual and uninteresting. No one looked like a detective. Loree felt secure, but not calm. Her feverish desire was to be alone with her twinkling treasure once more, and she wasted no time in getting back to her room.

Late in the afternoon she dressed hurriedly in a delightful frock of transparent blue muslin the colour of asphodels, and prepared for her drive with Quelch. When she glanced into the mirror just before leaving, she saw that, like Bathsheba, she was fair to look upon. But it was a new and glittering beauty that she had. Her cheek glowed; her eyes burned. Pat Temple would hardly have known his wife.

Quelch’s eyes told her even more than the mirror. As she came down the main stairway, she saw him standing in the hall, reading a letter which had just been handed to him from the office. Its perusal seemed to afford him pleasure, but nothing like the unfeigned gladness with which he looked up at her. Neither he nor any one else could have guessed from outward and visible signs that the sweet vision in diaphanous draperies of Madonna blue carried a canker at her heart—a canker in a little silk bag.

The racing car was at the door—a keen-nosed silvery affair, with no seats, only flat cushions of sleek grey silk. They had to climb over the sides and sit cheek by jowl on the floor, and there was a great sheaf of scarlet roses for Loree’s lap. It is no use denying that these charming attentions touch women deeply. Only stupid men underrate the magic influence of gifts, especially the fragrant gift of flowers. Those roses scented all the afternoon.

Quelch had the art of communicating himself without words. Loree was acutely aware of his insolent pride in her beauty as they drove through the streets. Men possess a curious degree this scratch-brant delight in the lust of the eye and pride of life. In Africa, perhaps they indulge it more than in most places. Climate may have something to do with it, but it is a dull affair to be a plain woman there, and to be a pretty one singularly intoxicating. There was something barbaric in the warm, bold satisfaction of Quelch’s eyes as they rested on her. She had the sense once more of living life to the full, and that old dream of hers of driving triumphant through the streets of Rome seemed curiously fulfilled. It was not strange to hear him say, very low:

“Don’t you feel that we have been together before somewhere?”

She did not answer, only smiled. A blue ripple of her gown resting on his grey-clad knee acted like an electric current between them.

The Rhodes Memorial stands a little way out of the town—a rather enchanted-looking Asian Temple, built of sandstone from the Matoppo Hills. They climbed its steep stairs and stood gazing from marble-pillared openings at a great vista of empty veld and a far line of hills. The Boers occupied those hills during the siege, and peppered Kimberley with fifteen hundred shells from their Long Tom, being blithely answered by Long Cecil, the big gun made in the De Beers workshops. Quelch recounted the tragic fate of Labran, the maker of this gun, who was killed by the second response from Long Tom.

Afterward, he fell into silence. It was Loree who talked lightly and incessantly. She had become aware of the danger of silence. When you are loitering on the perilous precipices, where the fire-flowers blow, words are little ropes