Elma gazed at him steadfastly. Tears stood in her eyes. Her voice trembled; but she was very firm.

"We must clear you and him of this dreadful charge," she said slowly. "I know we must do that, Cyril. Guy didn't kill him. Guy's wholly incapable of it. But where is Guy now? That's what I don't understand. We must clear that all up. Though, even when it's cleared up, I can only LOVE you. As I told you that day at Chetwood—and I mean it still—whatever comes to us two, I can never, never marry you."

"Not even if I clear this all up?" Cyril asked, with a wistful look.

"Not even if you clear this all up," Elma answered seriously. "The difficulty's on MY side, don't you see, not on yours at all. So far as you're concerned, Cyril, clear this up or leave it just where it is, I'd marry you to-morrow. I'd marry you at once, and proud to do it, if only to show the world openly I trust you both. I half faltered just once as you stood there in court, whether I wouldn't say yes to you, for nothing else but that—to let everybody see how implicitly I trusted you."

"But I couldn't allow it," Cyril answered, all aglow. "As things stand now, Elma, our positions are reversed. While this cloud still hangs so black over Guy, I couldn't find it in my conscience to ask you to marry me."

He gazed at her steadily. They were both too profoundly stirred for tears or emotions. A quiet despair gleamed in the eyes of each. Cyril could never marry her till he had cleared up this mystery. Elma could never marry him, even if it were all cleared up, with that terrible taint of madness, as she thought it, hanging threateningly for ever over her and her family.

She paused for a minute or two, with her hand locked in his. Then she said once more, very low, "No, Guy didn't do it. But why did he run away? That baffles me quite. That's the one point of it all that makes it so strange and so terribly mysterious."

"Elma," Cyril answered, with a cold thrill, "I believe in Guy; I think I know myself, and I think I know him, well enough to say that such a thing as murder is impossible for either of us. He's weak at times, I admit, and his will was powerless before the magnetic force of Montague Nevitt's. But when I try to face that inscrutable mystery of why, if he's innocent, he has run away from this charge, I confess my faith begins to falter and tremble. He must have seen it in the papers. He must have seen I was accused. What can he mean by leaving me to bear it in his stead without ever coming forward to help me fairly out of it?"

Elma looked up at him with another of her sudden flashes of superb intuition. "He CAN'T have seen it in the papers," she said. "That gives us some clue. If he'd seen it, he MUST have come forward to help you. But, Cyril, MY faith never falters at all. And I tell you why. Not only do I know Guy didn't do it, but I know who did it. The man who murdered Montague Nevitt is—why shouldn't I tell you?—Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve!"

Cyril started back astonished. "Oh, Elma, why do you think so?" he cried in amazement. "What possible reason can you have for saying so?"

"None," Elma answered, with a calmly resigned air. "I only know it; I know it from his eyes. I looked in them once and read it like a book. But of course that's nothing. What we must do now is to try and find out the facts. I looked in his eyes and I saw it at a glance. And I saw he saw it. He knows I've discovered him."

Cyril half drew away from her with a faint sense of alarm. "Elma," he said slowly, "I believe in Guy; but really and truly I can't quite believe THAT. You make your intuition tell you far too much. In your natural anxiety to screen my brother, you've fixed the guilt, without proof, upon another innocent man. I'm sure Mr. Gildersleeve's as incapable as Guy of any such action."

"And I'm sure of it, too," Elma answered, with the instinctive certainty of feminine conviction. "But still I know, for all that, he did it. Perhaps it was all done in a moment of haste. But at least he did it. And nothing on earth that anybody could say will ever make me believe he didn't."

When Mrs. Clifford came back to the hotel an hour later, she scanned her daughter's face with a keen glance of inquiry.

"Well, he says he won't ask you again," she murmured, laying Elma's head on her shoulder, "till this case is cleared up, and Guy is proved innocent."

"Yes," Elma answered, nestling close and looking red as a rose. "He knows very well Guy didn't do it, but he wants all the rest of the world to acknowledge it also."

"And YOU know who did it?" Mrs, Clifford said, with a tentative air.

"Yes, mother. Do you?"

"Of course I do, darling. But it'll never be proved against HIM, you may be sure. I saw it at a glance. It's Mr. Gilbert Gildersleeve."



CHAPTER XXX.

FRESH DISCOVERIES.



As Cyril drove home from Waterloo next day to his lonely rooms in Staple Inn, Holborn, he turned aside with his cab for a few minutes to make a passing call at the bank in Lombard Street. He was short of ready money, and wanted to cash a cheque for fifty pounds for expenses incurred in his defence at Tavistock.

The cashier stared at him hard; then, without consulting anybody, he said, in a somewhat embarrassed tone, "I don't know whether you're aware of it, Mr. Waring, but this overdraws your current account. We haven't fifty pounds on our books to your credit."

He was well posted on the subject, in fact, for only that morning he had hunted up Cyril's balance in the ledger at his side for the gratification of his own pure personal curiosity.

Cyril stared at him in astonishment. In this age of surprises, one more surprise was thus suddenly sprung upon him. His first impulse was to exclaim in a very amazed voice, "Why, I've six thousand odd pounds to my credit, surely;" but he checked himself in time with a violent effort. How could he tell what strange things might have happened in his absence? If the money was gone, and Nevitt was murdered, and Guy in hiding, who could say what fresh complications might not still be in store for him? So he merely answered, with a strenuous endeavour to suppress his agitation, "Will you kindly let me have my balance-sheet, if you please? I—ur—I thought I'd more money than that still left with you."

The cashier brought out a big book and a bundle of cheques, which he handed to Cyril with a face of profound interest. To him, too, this little drama was pregnant with mystery and personal implications. Cyril turned the vouchers over one by one, with close attention, recognising the signature and occasion of each, till he arrived at last at a big cheque which staggered him sadly for a moment. He took it up in his hands and examined it in the light. "Pay Self or Bearer, Six Thousand Pounds (L6,000), Cyril Waring."

Oh, horrible, horrible! This, then, was the secret of Guy's sudden disappearance.

He didn't cry aloud. He didn't say a word. He looked at the thing hard, and knew in a moment exactly what had happened. Guy had forged that cheque; it was Guy's natural hand, written forward like Cyril's own, instead of backward, as usual. And no one but himself could possibly have told it from his own true signature. But Cyril knew it at once for Guy's by one infallible sign—a tiny sign that might escape the veriest expert—some faint hesitation about the tail of the capital C, which was shorter in Guy's hand than Cyril ever made it, and which Guy had therefore deliberately lengthened, by an effort or an afterthought, to complete the imitation.

"You cashed that cheque yourself, sir, over the counter, you remember," the cashier said quietly, "on the date it was drawn on."

Cyril never altered a muscle of his rigid face.

"Ah, quite so," he answered, in a very dry voice, not daring to contradict the man. He knew just what had happened. Guy must have come to get the money himself, and the cashier must have mistaken him for the proper owner of the purloined six thousand. They were so very much alike. Nobody ever distinguished them.

"And that was one of the days, I think, when you proved the alibi in Belgium before the Devonshire magistrates at Tavistock yesterday," the clerk went on, with a searching glance. Cyril started this time. He saw in a second the new danger thus sprung upon him. If the cashier chose to press the matter home to the hilt, he must necessarily arrive at one or other of two results. Either the alibi would break down altogether, or it would be perfectly clear that Guy had committed a forgery.

"So it seems," he answered, looking his keen interlocutor straight in the eyes. "So it seems, I should say, by the date on the face of it."

But the cashier did NOT care to press the matter home any further; and for a very good reason. It was none of his business to suggest the idea of a forgery, after a cheque had been presented and duly cashed, if the customer to whose account it was debited in course chose voluntarily to accept the responsibility of honouring it. The objection should come first from the customer's side. If HE didn't care to press it, then neither did the cashier. Why should he, indeed? Why saddle his firm with six thousand pounds loss? He would only get himself into trouble for having failed to observe the discrepancy in the signatures, and the difference between the brothers. That, after all, is what a cashier is for. If he doesn't fulfil those first duties of his post, why what on earth can be the good of him to anybody in any way?

The two men looked at one another across the counter with a strong inscrutable stare of mutual suspicion. Then Cyril slowly tore up the cheque he had tendered for fifty pounds, filled in another for his real balance of twenty-two, handed it across to the clerk without another word, received the cash in white trembling hands, and went out to his cab again in a turmoil of excitement.

All the way back to his rooms in Staple Inn one seething idea alone possessed his soul. His faith in Guy was beginning to break down. And with it, his faith in himself almost went. The man was his own brother—his very counterpart, he knew; could he really believe him capable of committing a murder? Cyril looked within, and said a thousand times NO; he looked at that forged cheque, and his heart misgave him.

At Staple Inn, the housekeeper who took care of their joint rooms came out to greet him with no small store of tears and lamentations. "Oh, Mr. Cyril," she cried, seizing both his hands in hers with a tremulous welcome, "I'm glad to see you back, and to know you're innocent. I always said you never could have done it; no, no, not you, nor yet Mr. Guy neither. The police has been here time and again to search the rooms, but, the Lord be praised, they never found anything. And I've got a letter for you, too, from Mr. Guy himself; but there—I locked it up till you come in my own cupboard at home, for fear of the detectives; and now you're back and safe in London again, I'll run home this minute round the corner and get it."

Cyril sat down in the familiar easy-chair, holding his face in his hands, and gazed about him blankly. Such a home-coming as this was inexpressibly terrible to him.

In a few minutes more the housekeeper came back, bringing in her hand Guy's letter from Plymouth.

Cyril sat for a minute and looked at the envelope in deadly silence. Then he motioned the housekeeper out of the room with one quivering hand. Before that good woman's face, he couldn't open it and read it.

As soon as she was gone, he tore it apart, trembling. As he read and read the suspicion within him deepened quickly into a doubt, the doubt into a conviction, the conviction into a certainty. He clapped his hands to his head. Oh, God, what was this? Guy acknowledged his own guilt! He confessed he had done it!

Cyril's last hope was gone. Guy himself admitted it!

"How I came to do it," the letter said, "I've no idea myself. A sudden suggestion—a strange, unaccountable impulse—a prompting, as it were, pressed upon me from without, and almost before I knew, the crime was committed."

Cyril bent his head low upon his knees with shame. He never could hold up that head henceforth. No further doubt or hesitation remained. He knew the whole truth. Guy was indeed a murderer.

He steeled himself for the worst, and read the letter through with a superhuman effort. It almost choked him to read. The very consecutiveness and coherency of the sentences seemed all but incredible under such awful circumstances. A murderer, red-handed, to speak of his crime so calmly as that! And then, too, this undying anger expressed and felt, even after death, against his victim Nevitt! Cyril couldn't understand how any man—least of all his own brother—could write such words about the murdered man whose body was then lying all silent and cold, under the open sky, among the bracken at Mambury.

And once more, this awful clue of the dead man's pocket-book! Those accursed notes! That hateful sum of money! How could Guy venture to speak of it all in such terms as those—the one palpable fact that indubitably linked him with that cold-blooded murder. "The three thousand sent herewith I recovered, almost by a miracle, from that false creature's grasp, under extraordinary circumstances, and I return them now, in proof of the fact, in Montague Nevitt's own pocket-book, which I'm sure you'll recognise as soon as you look at it."

Cyril saw it all now beyond the shadow of a doubt. He reconstructed the whole sad tale. He was sure he understood it. But to understand it was hardly even yet to believe it. Guy had lost heavily in the Rio Negro Mines, as the prosecution declared; in an evil hour he'd been cajoled into forging Cyril's name for six thousand. Montague Nevitt had in some way misappropriated the stolen sum. Guy had pursued him in a sudden white-heat of fury, had come up with him unawares, had killed him in his rage, and now calmly returned as much as he could recover of that fateful and twice-stolen money to Cyril. It was all too horrible, but all too true. In a wild ferment of remorse for his brother's sin, the unhappy painter sat down at once and penned a letter of abject self-humiliation to Elma Clifford.

"ELMA,-I said to you last night that I could never marry you till I had clearly proved my brother Guy's innocence. Well, I said what I can never conceivably do. Since returning to town I received a letter from Guy himself. What it contained I must never tell you, for Guy's own sake. But what I MUST tell you is this—I can never again see you. Guy and I are so nearly one, in every nerve and fibre of our being, that whatever he may have done is to me almost as if I myself had done it. You will know how terrible a thing it is for me to write these words, but for YOUR sake I can't refrain from writing them. Think no more of me. I am not worthy of you. I will think of you as long as I live.

"Your ever devoted and heart-broken

"CYRIL."

He folded the letter, and sent it off to the temporary address at the West-End where Elma had told him that she and her mother would spend the night in London. Very late that evening a ring came at the bell. Cyril ran to the door. It was a boy with a telegram. He opened it, and read it with breathless excitement.

"Whatever Guy may have said, you are quite mistaken. There's a mystery somewhere. Keep his letter and show it to me. I may, perhaps, be able to unravel the tangle. I'm more than ever convinced that what I said to you last night was perfectly true. We will save him yet. Unalterably,

"ELMA."

But the telegram brought little peace to Cyril. Of what value were Elma's vague intuitions now, by the side of Guy's own positive confession? With his very own hand Guy admitted that he had done it. Cyril went to bed that night, the unhappiest, loneliest man in London. What Guy was, he was. He felt himself almost like the actual murderer.



CHAPTER XXXI.

"GOLDEN JOYS."



The voyage to the Cape was long and tedious. On the whole way out, Guy made but few friends, and talked very little to his fellow passengers. That unhappy recognition by Granville Kelmscott the evening he went on board the Cetewayo poisoned the fugitive's mind for the entire passage. He felt himself, in fact, a moral outcast; he slunk away from his kind; he hardly dared to meet Kelmscott's eyes for shame, whenever he passed him. But for one thing at least he was truly grateful. Though Kelmscott had evidently discovered from the papers the nature of Guy's crime, and knew his real name well, it was clear he had said nothing of any sort on the subject to the other passengers. Only one man on board was aware of his guilt, Guy believed, and that one man he shunned accordingly as far as was possible within the narrow limits of the saloon and the quarter-deck.

Granville Kelmscott, of course, took a very different view of Guy Waring's position. He had read in the paper he bought at Plymouth that Guy was the murderer of Montague Nevitt. Regarding him, therefore, as a criminal of the deepest dye now flying from justice, he wasn't at all surprised at Guy's shrinking and shunning him; what astonished him rather was the man's occasional and incredible fits of effrontery. How that fellow could ever laugh and talk at all among the ladies on deck—with the hangman at his back—simply appalled and horrified the proud soul of a Kelmscott. Granville had hard work to keep from expressing his horror openly at times. But still, with an effort, he kept his peace. With the picture of his father and Lady Emily now strong before his mind, he couldn't find it in his heart to bring his own half-brother, however guilty and criminal the man might be, to the foot of the gallows.

So they voyaged on together without once interchanging a single word, all the way from Plymouth to the Cape Colony. And the day they landed at Port Elizabeth, it was an infinite relief indeed to Guy to think he could now get well away for ever from that fellow Kelmscott. Not being by any means over-burdened with ready cash, however, Guy determined to waste no time in the coastwise towns, but to make his way at once boldly up country towards Kimberley. The railway ran then only as far as Grahamstown; the rest of his journey to the South African Golconda was accomplished by road, in a two-wheeled cart, drawn by four small horses, which rattled along with a will, up hill and down dale, over the precarious highways of that semi-civilized upland.

To Guy, just fresh from England and the monotonous sea, there was a certain exhilaration in this first hasty glimpse of the infinite luxuriance of sub-tropical nature. At times he almost forgot Montague Nevitt and the forgery in the boundless sense of freedom and novelty given him by those vast wastes of rolling tableland, thickly covered with grass or low thorny acacias, and stretching illimitably away in low range after range to the blue mountains in the distance. It was strange indeed to him on the wide plains through which they scurried in wild haste to see the springbok rush away from the doubtful track at the first whirr of their wheels, or the bolder bustard stand and gaze among the long grass, with his wary eye turned sideways to look at them. Guy felt for the moment he had left Europe and its reminiscences now fairly behind him; in this free new world, he was free once more himself; his shame was cast aside; he could revel like the antelopes in the immensity of a land where nobody knew him and he knew nobody.

What added most of all, however, to this quaint new sense of vastness and freedom was the occasional appearance of naked blacks, roaming at large through the burnt-up fields of which till lately they had been undisputed possessors. Day after day Guy drove on along the uncertain roads, past queer outlying towns of white wooden houses—Cradock, and Middelburg, and Colesberg, and others—till they crossed at last the boundary of Orange River into the Free State, and halted for a while in the main street of Philippolis.

It was a dreary place; Guy began now to see the other side of South Africa. Though he had left England in autumn, it was spring-time at the Cape, and the winter drought had parched up all the grass, leaving the bare red dust in the roads or streets as dry and desolate as the sand of the desert. The town itself consisted of some sixty melancholy and distressful houses, bare, square, and flat-roofed, standing unenclosed along a dismal high-road, and with that congenitally shabby look, in spite of their newness, which seems to belong by nature to all southern buildings. Some stagnant pools alone remained to attest the presence after rain of a roaring brook, the pits in whose dried-up channel they now occupied; over their tops hung the faded foliage of a few dust-laden trees, struggling hard for life with the energy of despair against depressing circumstances. It was a picture that gave Guy a sudden attack of pessimism; if THIS was the El Dorado towards which he was going, he earnestly wished himself back again once more, forgery or no forgery, among the breezy green fields of dear old England.

On to Fauresmith he travelled with less comfort than before in a rickety buggy of most primitive construction, designed to meet the needs of rough mountain roads, and as innocent of springs as Guy himself of the murder of Montague Nevitt. It was a wretched drive. The drought had now broken; the wet season had begun; rain fell heavily. A piercing cold wind blew down from the nearer mountains; and Guy began to feel still more acutely than ever that South Africa was by no means an earthly paradise. As he drove on and on this feeling deepened upon him. Huge blocks of stone obstructed the rough road, intersected as it was by deep cart-wheel ruts, down which the rain-water now flowed in impromptu torrents. The Dutch driver, too, anxious to show the mettle of his coarse-limbed steeds, persisted in dashing over the hummocky ground at a break-neck pace, while Guy balanced himself with difficulty on the narrow seat, hanging on to his portmanteau for dear life among the jerks and jolts, till his ringers were numbed with cold and exposure.

They held out against it all, before the pelting rain, till man and beast were well-nigh exhausted. At last, about three-quarters of the way to Fauresmith, on the bleak bare hill-tops, sleety snow began to fall in big flakes, and the barking of a dog to be heard in the distance. The Boer driver pricked up his ears at the sound.

"That must a house be," he remarked in his Dutch pigeon-English to Guy; and Guy felt in his soul that the most miserable and filthy of Kaffir huts would just then be a welcome sight to his weary eyes. He would have given a sovereign, indeed, from the scanty store he possessed, for a night's lodging in a convenient dog-kennel. He was agreeably surprised, therefore, to find it was a comfortable farmhouse, where the lights in the casement beamed forth a cheery welcome on the wet and draggled wayfarers from real glass windows. The farmer within received them hospitably. Business was brisk to-day. Another traveller, he said, had just gone on towards Fauresmith.

"A young man like yourself, fresh from England," the farmer observed, scanning Guy closely. "He's off for the diamond diggings. I think to Dutoitspan."

Guy rested the right there, thinking nothing of the stranger, and went on next day more quietly to Fauresmith. Thence to the diamond fields, the country became at each step more sombre and more monotonous than ever. In the afternoon they rested at Jacobsdal, another dusty, dreary, comfortless place, consisting of about five and twenty bankrupt houses scattered in bare clumps over a scorched-up desert. Then on again next day, over a drearier and ever drearier expanse of landscape. It was ghastly. It was horrible. At last, on the top of a dismal hill range, looking down on a deep dale, the driver halted. In the vast flat below, a dull dense fog seemed to envelop the world with inscrutable mists. The driver pointed to it with his demonstrative whip.

"Down yonder," he said encouragingly, as he put the skid on his wheel, "down yonder's the diamond fields—that's Dutoitspan before you."

"What makes it so grey?" Guy asked, looking in front of him with a sinking heart. This first view of his future home was by no means encouraging.

"Oh, the sand make it be like that," the driver answered unconcernedly. "Diamond fields all make up of fine red sand; and diggers pile it about around their own claims. Then the wind comes and blow, and make sandstorm always around Dutoitspan."

Guy groaned inwardly. This was certainly NOT the El Dorado of his fancy. They descended the hill, at the same break-neck pace as before, and entered the miserable mushroom town of diamond-grubbers. Amidst the huts in the diggings great heaps of red earth lay piled up everywhere. Dust and sand rose high on the hot breeze into the stifling air. As they reached the encampment—for Dutoitspan then was little more than a camp—the blinding mists of solid red particles drove so thick in their eyes that Guy could hardly see a few yards before him. Their clothes and faces were literally encrusted in thick coats of dust. The fine red mist seemed to pervade everything. It filled their eyes, their nostrils, their ears, their mouths. They breathed solid dust. The air was laden deep with it.

And THIS was the diamond fields! This was the Golconda where Guy was to find six thousand pounds ready made to recover his losses and to repay Cyril. Oh, horrible, horrible. His heart sank low at it.

And still they went on, and on, and on, and on, through the mist of dust to the place for out-spanning. Guy only shared the common fate of all new-comers to "the fields" in feeling much distressed and really ill. The very horses in the cart snorted and sneezed and showed their high displeasure by trying every now and then to jib and turn back again. Here and there, on either side, to right and left, where the gloom permitted it, Guy made out dimly a few round or oblong tents, with occasional rude huts of corrugated iron. A few uncertain figures lounged vaguely in the background. On closer inspection they proved to be much-grimed and half-naked natives, resting their weary limbs on piles of dry dust after their toil in the diggings.

It was an unearthly scene. Guy's heart sank lower and lower still at every step the horses took into that howling wilderness.

At last the driver drew up with a jolt in front of a long low hut of corrugated iron, somewhat larger than the rest, but no less dull and dreary. "The hotel," he said briefly; and Guy jumped out to secure himself a night's lodging or so at this place of entertainment, till he could negotiate for a hut and a decent claim, and commence his digging.

At the bar of the primitive saloon where he found himself landed, a man in a grey tweed suit was already seated. He was drinking something fizzy from a tall soda-water glass. With a sudden start of horror Guy recognised him at once. Oh, great heavens, what was this? It was Granville Kelmscott!

Then Granville, too, was bound for the diamond fields like himself. What an incredible coincidence! How strange! How inexplicable! That rich man's son, the pampered heir to Tilgate! what could HE be doing here, in this out-of-the-way spot, this last resort of poor broken-down men, this miserable haunt of wretched gambling money-grubbers?

Here curiosity, surely, must have drawn him to the spot. He couldn't have come to DIG! Guy gazed in amazement at that grey tweed suit. He must be staying for a day or two in search of adventure. No more than just that! He couldn't mean to STOP here.

As he gazed and stood open-mouthed in the shadow of the door, Granville Kelmscott, who hadn't seen him enter, laid down his glass, wiped his lips with gusto, and continued his conversation with the complacent barman.

"Yes, I want a hut here," he said, "and to buy a good claim. I've been looking over the kopje down by Watson's spare land, and I think I've seen a lot that's likely to suit me."

Guy sould hardly restrain his astonishment and surprise. He had come, then, to dig! Oh, incredible! impossible!

But at any rate this settled his own immediate movements. Guy's mind was made up at once. If Granville Kelmscott was going to dig at Dutoitspan—why, clearly Dutoitspan was no place for HIM. He could never stand the continual presence of the one man in South Africa who knew his deadly secret. Come what might he must leave the neighbourhood without a moment's delay. He must strike out at once for the far interior. As he paused, Granville Kelmscott turned round and saw him. Their eyes met with a start. Each was equally astonished. Then Granville rose slowly from his seat, and murmured in a low voice, as he regarded him fixedly—

"You here again, Mr. Billington! This is once too often. I hardly expected THIS. There's no room here for both of us."

And he strode from the saloon, with a very black brow, leaving Guy for the moment alone with the barman.



CHAPTER XXXII.

A NEW DEPARTURE.



A fortnight later, one sultry afternoon, Granville Kelmscott found himself, after various strange adventures and escapes by the way, in a Koranna hut, far in the untravelled heart of the savage Barolong country.

The tenement where he sat, or more precisely squatted, was by no means either a commodious or sweet-scented one. Yet it was the biggest of a group on the river-bank, some five feet high from floor to roof, so that a Kelmscott couldn't possibly stand erect at full length in it; and it was roughly round in shape, like an overgrown beehive, the framework consisting of branches of trees, arranged in a rude circle, over whose arching ribs native rush mats had been thrown or sewn with irregular order. The door was a hole, through which the proud descendant of the squires of Tilgate had to creep on all fours; a hollow pit dug out in the centre served as the only fireplace; smoke and stagnant air formed the staples of the atmosphere. A more squalid hovel Granville Kelmscott had never even conceived as possible. It was as dirty and as loathsome as the most vivid imagination could picture the hut of the lowest savages.

Yet here that delicately nurtured English gentleman was to be cooped up for an indefinite time, as it seemed, by order of the black despot who ruled over the Barolong with a rod of iron.

What had led Granville Kelmscott into this extraordinary scrape it would not be hard to say. The Kelmscott nature, in all its embodiments, worked on very simple but very fixed lines. The moment Granville saw his half-brother Guy at Dutoitspan, his mind was made up at once as to his immediate procedure. He wouldn't stop one day—one hour longer than necessary where he could see that fellow who committed the murder. Come what might, he would make his escape at once into the far interior.

As before in England, so now in Africa, both brothers were moved by the self-same impulses. And each carried them out with characteristic promptitude.

Where could Granville go, however? Well, it was rumoured at Dutoitspan that "pebbles" had been found far away to the north in the Barolong country. "Pebbles," of course, is good South African for diamonds; and at this welcome news all Kimberley and Griqualand pricked up their ears with congenial delight; for business was growing flat on the old-established diamond fields. The palmy era of great finds and lucky hits was now long past; the day of systematic and prosaic industry had set in instead for the over-stocked diggings. It was no longer possible for the luckiest fresh hand to pick up pebbles lying loose on the surface; the mode of working had become highly skilled and scientific.

Machines and scaffolds, and washing-cradles and lifting apparatus were now required to make the business a success; the simple old gambling element was rapidly going out, and the capitalist was rapidly coming up in its stead as master of the situation. So Granville Kelmscott, being an enterprising young man, though destitute of cash, and utterly ignorant of South African life, determined to push on with all his might and main into the Barolong country, and to rush for the front among the first in the field in these rumoured new diggings on the extreme north frontier of civilization.

He started alone, as a Kelmscott might do, and made his way adventurously, without any knowledge of the Koranna language or manners, through many wild villages of King Khatsua's dominions. Night after night he camped out in the open; and day after day he tramped on by himself, buying food as he went from the natives for English silver, in search of precious stones, over that dreary tableland. At last, on the fourteenth day, in a deep alluvial hollow near a squalid group of small Barolong huts, he saw a tiny round stone, much rubbed and water-worn, which he picked up and examined with no little curiosity. The two days he had spent at Dutoitspan had not been wasted. He had learnt to recognise the look of the native gem. Once glance told him at once what his pebble was. He recognised it at sight as one of those small but much-valued diamonds of the finest water, which diggers know by the technical name of "glass-stones."

The hollow where he stood was in fact an ancient alluvial pit or volcanic mud-crater. Scoriac rubble filled it in to a very great depth; and in the interstices of this rubble were embedded here and there rude blocks of greenstone, containing almond-shaped chalcedonies and agate and milk-quartz, with now and then a tiny water-worn spec which an experienced eye would have detected at once as the finest "riverstones."

Here indeed was a prize! The solitary Englishman recognised in a second that he was the first pioneer of a new and richer Kimberley.

But as Granville Kelmscott stood still, looking hard at his find through the little pocket-lens he had brought with him from England, with a justifiable tremor of delight at the pleasant thought that here, perhaps, he had lighted on the key to something which might restore him once more to his proper place at Tilgate, he was suddenly roused from his delightful reverie by a harsh negro voice, shrill and clear, close behind him, saying, in very tolerable African-English—

"Hillo, you white man! what dat you got there? You come here to Barolong land, so go look for diamond?"

Granville turned sharply round, and saw standing by his side a naked and stalwart black man, smiling blandly at his discovery with broad negro amusement.

"It's a pebble," the Englishman said, pocketing it as carelessly as he could, and trying to look unconcerned, for his new acquaintance held a long native spear in his stout left hand, and looked by no means the sort of person to be lightly trifled with.

"Oh, dat a pebble, mistah white man!" the Barolong said sarcastically, holding out his black right hand with a very imperious air. "Den you please hand him over dat pebble you find. Me got me orders. King Khatsua no want any diamond digging in Barolong land."

Granville tried to parley with the categorical native; but his attempts at palaver were eminently unsuccessful. The naked black man was master of the situation.

"You hand over dat stone, me friend," he said, assuming a menacing attitude, and holding out his hand once more with no very gentle air, "or me run you trew de body wit me assegai—just so! King Khatsua, him no want any diamond diggings in Barolong land."

And, indeed, Granville Kelmscott couldn't help admitting to himself, when he came to think of it, that King Khatsua was acting wisely in his generation. For the introduction of diggers into his dominions would surely have meant, as everywhere else, the speedy proclamation of a British protectorate, and the final annihilation of King Khatsua himself and his dusky fellow-countrymen.

There is nothing, to say the truth, the South African native dreads so much as being "eaten up," as he calls it, by those aggressive English. King Khatsua knew his one chance in life consisted in keeping the diggers firmly out of his dominions; and he was prepared to deny the very existence of diamonds throughout the whole of Barolong land, until the English, by sheer force, should come in flocks and unearth them.

In obedience to his chief's command, therefore, the naked henchman still held out his hand menacingly.

"Dis land King Khatsua's," he repeated once more, in an angry voice. "All diamonds found on it belong to King Khatsua. Just you hand dat over. No steal; no tief-ee."

The instincts of the land-owning class were too strong in Granville Kelmscott not to make him admit at once to himself the justice of this claim. The owner of the soil had a right to the diamonds. He handed over the stone with a pang of regret. The savage grinned to himself, and scanned it attentively. Then extending his spear, as one might do to a cow or a sheep, he drove Granville before him.

"You come along a' me," he said shortly, in a most determined voice. "You come along a' me. King Khatsua's orders."

Granville went before him without one word of remonstrance, much wondering what was likely to happen next, till he found himself suddenly driven into that noisome hut, where he was forced to enter ignominiously on all fours, like an eight months' old baby.

By the light of the fire that burned dimly in the midst of his captor's house he could see, as his eyes grew gradually accustomed to the murky gloom, a strange and savage scene, such as he had never before in his life dreamt of. In the pit of the hut some embers glowed feebly, from whose midst a fleecy object was sputtering and hissing. A second glance assured him that the savoury morsel was the head of an antelope in process of roasting. Two greasy black women, naked to the waist, were superintending this primitive cookery; all round, a group of unclad little imps, as black as their mothers, lounged idly about, with their eyes firmly fixed on the chance of dinner. As Granville entered, the husband and father, poking in his head, shouted a few words after him. Another native outside kept watch and ward with a spear at the door meanwhile, to prevent his escape against King Khatsua's orders.

For two long hours the Englishman waited there, fretting and fuming, in that stifling atmosphere. Meanwhile, the antelope's head was fully cooked, and the women and children falling on it like wild beasts, tore off the scorched fleece and snatched the charred flesh from the bones with their fingers greedily. It was a hideous sight; it sickened him to see it.

By—and—by Granville heard a loud voice outside. He listened in surprise. It sounded as though Barolong had another prisoner. There was a pause and a scuffle. Then, all of a sudden, somebody else came bundling unceremoniously through the hole that served for a door, in the same undignified fashion as he himself had done. Granville's eyes, now accustomed to the gloom, recognised the stranger at once with a thrill of astonishment. He could hardly trust his senses at the sight. It was—no, it couldn't be—yes, it was—Guy Waring.

Guy Waring, sure enough; as before, they were companions. The Kelmscott character had worked itself out exactly alike in each of them. They had come independently by the self-same road to the rumoured diamond fields of the Barolong country.

It was some minutes, however, before Guy, for his part, recognised his fellow-prisoner in the dark and gloomy hut. Then each stared at the other in mute surprise. They found no words to speak their mutual astonishment. This was more wonderful, to be sure, than even either of their former encounters.

For another long hour the two unfriendly English-men huddled away from one another in opposite corners of that native hut, without speaking a word of any sort in their present straits. At the end of that time, a voice spoke at the door some guttural sentences in the Barolong language. The natives inside responded alike in their own savage clicks. Next the voice spoke in English; it was Granville's captor, he now knew well.

"White men, you come out; King Khatsua himself, him go to 'peak to you."

They crawled out, one at a time, in sorry guise, through the narrow hole. It was a pitiful exhibition. Were it not for the danger and uncertainty of the event, they could almost themselves have fairly laughed at it. King Khatsua stood before them, a tall, full-blooded black, in European costume, with a round felt hat and a crimson tie, surrounded by his naked wives and attendants. In his outstretched hand he held before their faces two incriminating diamonds. He spoke to them with much dignity at considerable length in the Barolong tongue, to a running accompaniment of laudatory exclamations—"Oh, my King! Oh, wise words!"—from the mouths of his courtiers. Neither Granville nor Guy understood, of course, a single syllable of the stately address; but that didn't in the least disturb the composure of the dusky monarch. He went right through to the end with his solemn warning, scolding them both roundly, as they guessed, in his native tongue, like a master reproving a pair of naughty schoolboys.

As he finished, their captor stood forth with great importance to act as interpreter. He had been to the Kimberly diamond mines himself as a labourer, and was therefore accounted by his own people a perfect model of English scholarship.

"King Khatsua say this," he observed curtly. "You very bad men; you come to Barolong land. King Khatsua say, Barolong land for Barolong. No allow white man dig here for diamonds. If white man come, him eat up Barolong. Keep white man out; keep land for King Khatsua."

"Does King Khatsua want us to leave his country, then?" Granville Kelmscott asked, with a distinct tremor in his voice, for the great chief and his followers looked decidedly hostile.

The interpreter threw back his head and laughed a loud long laugh.

"King Khatsua not a fool!" he answered at last, after a rhetorical pause. "King Khatsua no want to give up his land to white man. If you two white man go back to Kimberley, you tell plenty other people, 'Diamonds in Barolong land.' You say, 'Come along o' me to Barolong land with gun; we show you where to dig 'um!' No, no, King Khatsua not a fool. King Khatsua say this. You two white man no go back to Kimberley. You spies. You stop here plenty time along o' King Khatsua. Never go back, till King Khatsua give leave. So no let any other white man come along into Barolong land."

Granville looked at Guy, and Guy looked at Granville. In this last extremity, before those domineering blacks, they almost forgot everything, save that they were both English. What were they to do now? The situation was becoming truly terrible.

The interpreter went on once more, however, with genuine savage enjoyment of the consternation he was causing them.

"King Khatsua say this," he continued, in a very amused tone. "You stop here plenty days, very good, in Barolong land. King Khatsua give you hut; King Khatsua give you claim; Barolong man bring spear and guard you. No do you any harm for fear of Governor. Governor keep plenty guns in Cape Town. You two white man live in hut together, dig diamonds together; get plenty pebbles. Keep one diamond you find for yourself; give one diamond after that to King Khatsua. Barolong man bring you plenty food, plenty drink, but no let you go back. You try to go, then Barolong man spear you."

The playful dig with which the savage thrust forward his assegai at that final remark showed Granville Kelmscott in a moment this was no idle threat. It was clear for the present they must accept the inevitable. They must remain in Barolong land; and he must share hut and work with that doubly hateful creature—the man who had deprived him of his patrimony at Tilgate, and whom he firmly believed to be the murderer of Montague Nevitt. This was what had come then of his journey to Africa! Truly, adversity makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows!



CHAPTER XXXIII.

TIME FLIES.



Eighteen months passed away in England, and nothing more was heard of the two fugitives to Africa. Lady Emily's cup was very full indeed. On the self-same day she learned of her husband's death and her son's mysterious and unaccountable disappearance. From that moment forth, he was to her as if dead. After Granville left, no letter or news of him, direct or indirect, ever reached Tilgate. It was all most inexplicable. He had disappeared into space, and no man knew of him.

Cyril, too, had now almost given up hoping for news of Guy. Slowly the conviction forced itself deeper and still deeper upon his mind, in spite of Elma, that Guy was really Montague Nevitt's murderer. Else how account for Guy's sudden disappearance, and for the fact that he never even wrote home his whereabouts? Nay, Guy's letter itself left no doubt upon his mind. Cyril went through life now oppressed continually with the terrible burden of being a murderer's brother.

And indeed everybody else—except Elma Clifford—implicitly shared that opinion with him. Cyril was sure the unknown benefactor shared it too, for Guy's six thousand pounds were never paid in to his credit—as indeed how could they, since Colonel Kelmscott, who had promised to pay them, died before receiving the balance of the purchase money for the Dowlands estate? Cyril slank through the world, then, weighed down by his shame, for Guy and he were each other's doubles, and he always had a deep underlying conviction that, as Guy was in any particular, so also in the very fibre of his nature he himself was.

Everybody else, except Elma Clifford; but in spite of all, Elma still held out firm, in her intuitive way, in favour of Guy's innocence. She knew it, she said; and there the matter dropped. And she knew quite equally, in her own firm mind, that Gilbert Gildersleeve was the real murderer.

Gilbert Gildersleeve, meanwhile, had gone up a step or two higher in the social scale. He had been promoted to the bench on the first vacancy, as all the world had long expected; but, strange to say, he took it far more modestly than all the world had ever anticipated. Indeed, before he was made a judge, everybody said he'd be intolerable in the ermine. He was blustering and bullying enough, in all conscience, as a mere Queen's Counsel; but when he came to preside in a court of his own, his insolence would surpass even the wonted insolence of our autocratic British justices. In this, however, everybody was mistaken.

A curious change had of late come over Gilbert Gildersleeve. The big, bullying lawyer was growing nervous and diffident, where of old he had been coarse and self-assertive and blustering. He was beginning at times almost to doubt his own absolute omniscience and absolute wisdom. He was prepared half to admit that under certain circumstances a prisoner might possibly be in the right, and that all crimes alike did not necessarily deserve the hardest sentence the law of the land allowed him to allot them. Habitual criminals even began, after a while, to express a fervent hope, as assizes approached, they might be tried by old Gildersleeve: "Gilly," they said, "gave a cove a chance": he wasn't "one of these 'ere reg'lar 'anging judges, like Sir 'Enery Atkins."

During those eighteen months, too, Cyril tried, as far as he could, from a stern sense of duty, to see as little as possible of Elma Clifford. He loved Elma still—that goes without saying—more devotedly than ever; and Elma's profound belief that Cyril's brother couldn't possibly have committed so grave a crime touched his heart to the core by its womanly confidence. There's nothing a man likes so much as being trusted. But he had declared in the first flush of his horror and despair that he would never again ask Elma to marry him till the cloud that hung over Guy's character had been lifted and dissipated; and now that, month after month, no news came from Guy and all hope seemed to fade, lie felt it would be wrong of him even to see her or speak with her.

On that question however, Elma herself had a voice as well. Man proposes; woman decides. And though Elma for her part had quite equally made up her mind never to marry Cyril, with that nameless terror of expected madness hanging ever over her head, she felt, on the other hand, her very loyalty to Cyril and to Cyril's brother imperatively demanded that she should still see him often, and display marked friendship towards him as openly as possible. She wanted the world to see plainly for itself that so far as this matter of Guy's reputation was concerned, if Cyril, for his part, wanted to marry her, she, on her side, would be quite ready to marry Cyril.

So she insisted on meeting him whenever she could, and on writing to him openly from time to time very affectionate notes—those familiar notes we all know so well and prize so dearly—full of hopeless love and unabated confidence. Yes, good Mr. Stockbroker who do me the honour to read my simple tale, smile cynically if you will! You pretend to care nothing for these little sentimentalities; but you know very well in your own heart, you've a bundle of them at home, very brown and yellow, locked up in your escritoire; and you'd let New Zealand Fours sink to the bottom of the Indian Ocean, and Egyptian Unified go down to zero, before ever you'd part with a single faded page of them.

What can a man do, then, even under such painful circumstances, when a girl whom he loves with all his heart lets him clearly see she loves him in return quite as truly? Cyril would have been more than human if he hadn't answered those notes in an equally ardent and equally desponding strain. The burden of both their tales was always this—even if YOU would, I couldn't, because I love you too much to impose my own disgrace upon you.

But what Elma's mysterious trouble could be, Cyril was still unable even to hazard a guess. He only knew she had some reason of her own which seemed to her a sufficient bar to matrimony, and made her firmly determine never, in any case, to marry any one.

About twelve months after Guy's sudden disappearance, however, a new element entered into Elma's life. At first sight, it seemed to have but little to do with the secret of her soul. It was merely that the new purchaser of the Dowlands estate had built herself a pretty little Queen Anne house on the ground, and come to live in it.

Nevertheless, from the very first day they met, Elma took most kindly to this new Miss Ewes, the strange and eccentric musical composer. The mistress of Dowlands was a distant cousin of Mrs. Clifford's own; so the family naturally had to call upon her at once; and Elma somehow seemed always to get on from the outset in a remarkable way with her mother's relations. At first, to be sure, Elma could see Mrs. Clifford was rather afraid to leave her alone with the odd new-comer, whose habits and manners were as curious and weird as the sudden twists and turns of her own wayward music. But, after a time, a change came over Mrs. Clifford in this respect; and instead of trying to keep Elma and Miss Ewes apart, it was evident to Elma—who never missed any of the small by-play of life—that her mother rather desired to throw them closely together. Thus it came to pass that one morning, about a month after Miss Ewes's arrival in her new home, Elma had run in with a message from her mother, and found the distinguished composer, as was often the case at that time of day, sitting dreamily at her piano, trying over on the gamut strange, fanciful chords of her own peculiar witch-like character. The music waxed and waned in a familiar lilt.

"That's beautiful," Elma cried enthusiastically, as the composer looked up at her with an inquiring glance. "I never heard anything in my life before that went so straight through one, with its penetrating melody. Such a lovely gliding sound, you know! So soft and serpentine!" And even as she said it, a deep flush rose red in the centre of her cheek. She was sorry for the words before they were out of her mouth. They recalled all at once, in some mysterious way, that horrid, persistent nightmare of the hateful snake-dance. In a second, Miss Ewes caught the bright gleam in her eye, and the deep flush on her cheek that so hastily followed it. A meaning smile came over the elder woman's face all at once, not unpleasantly. She was a handsome woman for her age, but very dark and gipsy-like, after the fashion of the Eweses, with keen Italian eyes and a large smooth expanse of powerful forehead. Lightly she ran her hand over the keys with a masterly touch, and fixed her glance as she did so on Elma. There was a moment's pause. Miss Ewes eyed her closely. She was playing a tune that seemed oddly familiar to Elma's brain somehow—to her brain, not to her ears, for Elma felt certain, even while she recognised it most, she had never before heard it. It was a tune that waxed and waned and curled up and down sinuously, and twisted in and out and—ah yes, now she knew it—raised its sleek head, and darted out its forked tongue, and vibrated with swift tremors, and tightened and slackened, and coiled resistlessly at last in great folds all around her. Elma listened, with eager eyes half starting from her head, with clenched nails dug deep into the tremulous palms, as her heart throbbed fast and her nerves quivered fiercely. Oh, it was wrong of Miss Ewes to tempt her like this! It was wrong, so wrong of her! For Elma knew what it was at once—the song she had heard running vaguely through her head the night of the dance—the night she fell in love with Cyril Waring.

With a throbbing heart, Elma sat down on the sofa, and tried with all her might and main not to listen, She clasped her hands still tighter. She refused to be wrought up. She wouldn't give way to it. If she had followed her own impulse, to be sure, she would have risen on the spot and danced that mad dance once more with all the wild abandonment of an almeh or a Zingari. But she resisted with all her might. And she resisted successfully.

Miss Ewes, never faltering, kept her keen eye fixed hard on her with a searching glance, as she ran over the keys in ever fresh combinations.

Faster, wilder, and stranger the music rose; but Elma sat still, her breast heaving hard, and her breath panting, yet otherwise as still and motionless as a statue. She knew Miss Ewes could tell exactly how she felt. She knew she was trying her; she knew she was tempting her to get up and dance; and yet, she was not one bit afraid of this strange weird woman, as she'd been afraid that sad morning at home of her own mother.

The composer went on fiercely for some minutes more, leaning close over the keyboard, and throwing her very soul, as Elma could plainly see, into the tips of her fingers. Then, suddenly she rose, and came over, well pleased, to the sofa where Elma sat. With a motherly gesture, she took Elma's hand; she smoothed her dark hair; she bent down with a tender look, in those strange grey eyes, and printed a kiss unexpectedly on the poor girl's forehead.

"Elma," she said, leaning over her, "do you know what that was? That was the Naga Snake Dance. It gave you an almost irresistible longing to rise, and hold the snake in your own hands, and coil his great folds around you. I could see how you felt. But you were strong enough to resist. That was very well done. You resisted even the force of my music, didn't you?"

Elma, trembling all over, but bursting with joy that she could speak of it at last without restraint to somebody, answered, in a very low and tremulous voice, "Yes, Miss Ewes, I resisted it."

Miss Ewes leant back in her place, and gazed at her long, with a very affectionate and motherly air. "Then I'm sure I don't know," she said at last, breaking out in a voice full of confidence, "why on earth you shouldn't marry this young man you're in love with!"

Elma's heart beat still harder and higher than ever.

"What young man?" she murmured low—just to test the enchantress.

And Miss Ewes made answer, without one moment's hesitation, "Why, of course, Cyril Waring!"

For a minute or two then, there was a dead silence. After that, Miss Ewes looked up and spoke again. "Have you felt it often?" she asked, without one word of explanation.

"Twice before," Elma answered, not pretending to misunderstand. "Once I gave way. That was the very first time, you see, and I didn't know yet exactly what it meant. The second time I knew, and then I resisted it."

Somehow, before Miss Ewes, she hardly ever felt shy. She was so conscious Miss Ewes knew all about it without her telling her.

The elder woman looked at her with unfeigned admiration.

"That was brave of you," she said quietly. "I couldn't have done it myself! I should have HAD to give way to it. Then in YOU it's dying out. That's as clear as daylight. It won't go any farther. I knew it wouldn't, of course, when I saw you resisted even the Naga dance. And for you, that's excellent.... For myself I encourage it. It's that that makes my music what it is. It's that that inspires me. I composed that Naga dance I just played over to you, Elma. But not all out of my own head. I couldn't have invented it. It comes down in our blood, my dear, to you and me alike. We both inherit it from a common ancestress."

"Tell me all about it," Elma cried, nestling close to her new friend with a wild burst of relief. "I don't know why, but I'm not at all ashamed of it all before you, Miss Ewes—at least, not in the way I am before mother."

"You needn't be ashamed of it," Miss Ewes answered kindly. "You've nothing to be ashamed of. It'll never trouble YOU in your life again. It always dies out at last; they say in the sixth or seventh generation, and when it's dying out, it goes as it went with you, on the night you first fell in love with Cyril. If, after that, you resist, it never comes back again. Year after year, the impulse grows feebler and feebler. And if you can withstand the Naga dance, you can withstand anything. Come here and take my hand, dear. I'll tell you all about it."

Late at night Elma sat, tearful but happy, in her own room at home, writing a few short lines to Cyril Waring. This was all she said—

"There's no reason on my side now, dearest Cyril. It's all a mistake. I'll marry you whenever and wherever you will. There need be no reason on your side either. I love you, and can trust you. Yours ever,

"ELMA."

When Cyril Waring received that note next morning he kissed it reverently, and put it away in his desk among a bundle of others. But he said to himself sternly in his own soul for all that, "Never, while Guy still rests under that cloud! And how it's ever to be lifted from him is to me inconceivable."



CHAPTER XXXIV.

A STROKE FOR FREEDOM.



In Africa, meanwhile, during those eighteen months, King Khatsua had kept his royal word. He had held his two European prisoners under close watch and ward in the Koranna hut he had assigned them for their residence.

Like most other negro princes, indeed, Khatsua was a shrewd man of business in his own way; and while he meant to prevent the English strangers from escaping seaward with news of the new El Dorado they had discovered in Barolong land, he hadn't the least idea of turning away on that account the incidental advantages to be gained for himself by permitting them to hunt freely in his dominions for diamonds. So long as they acquiesced in the rough-and-ready royalty of 50 per cent, he had proposed to them when he first decided to detain them in his own territory—one stone for the king, and one for the explorers—they were free to pursue their quest after gems to their hearts' content in the valleys of Barolong land. And as the two Englishmen, for their part, had nothing else to do in Africa, and as they still went on hoping against hope for some chance of escape or rescue, they dug for diamonds with a will, and secured a number of first-class stones that would have made their fortunes indeed—if only they could have got them to the sea or to England.

Of course they lived perforce in the Koranna hut assigned them by the king, in pretty much the same way as the Korannas themselves did. King Khatsua's men supplied them abundantly with grain, and fruits, and game; and even at times procured them ready-made clothes, by exchange with Kimberley. In other respects, they were not ill-treated; they were merely detained "during his majesty's pleasure." But as his majesty had no intention of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs, or of letting them go, if he could help it, to spread the news of their find among their greedy fellow-countrymen, it seemed to them both as if they might go on being detained like this in Barolong land for an indefinite period.

Still, things went indifferently with them. As they lived and worked together in their native hut by Khatsua's village, a change began slowly but irresistibly to come over Granville Kelmscott's feelings towards his unacknowledged half-brother. At first, it was with the deepest sense of distaste and loathing that the dispossessed heir found himself compelled to associate with Guy Waring in such close companionship. But, bit by bit, as they two saw more and more of one another, this feeling of distaste began to wear off piecemeal. Granville Kelmscott was more than half ashamed to admit it even to himself, but in process of time he really almost caught himself beginning to like—well, to like the man he believed to be a murderer. It was shocking and horrible, no doubt; but what else was he to do? Guy formed now his only European society. By the side of those savage Barolongs, whose chief thought nothing of perpetrating the most nameless horrors before their very eyes, for the gratification of mere freaks of passion or jealousy, a European murderer of the gentlemanly class seemed almost by comparison a mild and gentle personage. Granville hardly liked to allow it in his own mind, but it was nevertheless the case; he was getting positively fond of this man, Guy Waring.

Besides, blood is generally thicker than water. Living in such close daily communion with Guy, and talking with him unrestrainedly at last upon all possible points—save that one unapproachable one, which both seemed to instinctively avoid alluding to in any way—Granville began to feel that, murderer or no murderer, Guy was in all essentials very near indeed to him. Nay, more, he found himself at times actually arguing the point with his own conscience that, after all, Guy was a very good sort of fellow; and if ever he had murdered Montague Nevitt at all—which looked very probable—he must have murdered him under considerably extenuating circumstances.

There was only one thing about Guy that Granville didn't like when he got to know him. This homicidal half-brother of his was gentle as a woman; tender, kindhearted, truthful, affectionate; a gentleman to the core, and a jolly good fellow into the bargain; but—there's always a but—he was a terrible money-grubber! Even there in the lost heart of Africa, at such a distance from home, with so little chance of ever making any use of his hoarded wealth, the fellow used to hunt up those wretched small stones, and wear them night and day in a belt round his waist, as if he really loved them for their own mere sakes—dirty high-priced little baubles! Granville, for his part, couldn't bear to see such ingrained love of pelf. It was miserable; it was mercenary.

To be sure, he himself hunted diamonds every day of his life, just as hard as Guy did; there was nothing else to do in this detestable place, and a man MUST find something to turn his idle hands to. Also he carried them, like Guy, bound up in a girdle round his own waist; it was a pity they should be lost, if ever he should chance to get away safe in the end to England. But then, don't you see, the cases were so different. Guy hoarded up his diamonds for mere wretched gain; whereas Granville valued his (he said to himself often) not for the mere worth in money of those shimmering little trinkets, but for his mother's sake, and Gwendoline's, and the credit of the family. He wanted Lady Emily to see her son filling the place in the world she had always looked forward with hope to his filling; and, by Heaven's help, he thought, he could still fill it. He couldn't marry Gwendoline on a beggar's pittance; and, by Heaven's help, he hoped still to be able to marry her.

Guy, on the other hand, found himself almost equally surprised in turn at the rapid way he grew really to be fond of Granville Kelmscott. Though Kelmscott knew, as he thought, the terrible secret of his half-unconscious crime—for he could feel now how completely he had acted under Montague Nevitt's compelling influence—Guy was aware before long of such a profound and deep-seated sympathy existing between them, that he became exceedingly attached in time to his friendly fellow-prisoner. In spite of the one barrier they could never break down, he spoke freely by degrees to Granville of everything else in his whole life; and Granville in return spoke to him just as freely. A good fellow, Granville, when you got to know him. There was only a single trait in his character Guy couldn't endure; and that was his ingrained love of money-grubbing. For the way the man pounced down upon those dirty little stones, when he saw them in the mud, and hoarded them up in his belt, and seemed prepared to defend them with his very life-blood, Guy couldn't conceal from himself-the fact that he fairly despised him. Such vulgar, common-place, unredeemed love of pelf! Such mere bourgeois avarice! Of what use could those wretched pebbles be to him here in the dusty plains of far inland Africa?

Guy himself kept close count of his finds, to be sure; but then, the cases, don't you see, were so different! HE wanted his diamonds to discharge the great debt of his life to Cyril, and to appear an honest man, rehabilitated once more, before the brother he had so deeply wronged and humiliated. Whereas Granville Kelmscott, a rich man's son, and the heir to a great estate beyond the dreams of avarice—that HE should have come risking his life in these savage wilds for mere increase of superfluous wealth, why, it was simply despicable.

So eighteen months wore away, in mutual friendship, tempered to a certain degree by mutual contempt, and little chance of escape came to the captives in Barolong land.

At last, as the second winter came round once more, for two or three weeks the Englishmen in their huts began to perceive that much bustle and confusion was going on all around in King Khatsua's dominions. Preparations for a war on a considerable scale were clearly taking place. Men mustered daily on the dusty plain with firearms and assegais. Much pombe was drunk; many palavers took place; a constant drumming of gongs and tom-toms disturbed their ears by day and by night. The Englishmen concluded some big marauding expedition was in contemplation. And they were quite right. King Khatsua was about to concentrate his forces for an attack on a neighbouring black monarch, as powerful and perhaps as cruel as himself, Montisive of the Bush Veldt.

Slowly the preparations went on all around. Then the great day came at last, and King Khatsua set forth on his mighty campaign, to the sound of big drums and the blare of native trumpets.

When the warriors had marched out of the villages on their way northward to the war, Guy saw the two prisoners' chance of escape had arrived in earnest. They were guarded as usual, of course; but not so strictly as before; and during the night, in particular, Guy noticed with pleasure, little watch was now kept upon them. The savage, indeed, can't hold two ideas in his head at once. If he's making war on his neighbour on one side, he has no room left to think of guarding his prisoners on the other.

"To-night," Guy said, one evening, as they sat together in their hut, over their native supper of mealie cakes and springbok venison, "we must make a bold stroke. We must creep out of the kraal as well as we can, and go for the sea westward, through Namaqua land to Angra Pequena."

"Westward?" Granville answered, very dubiously. "But why westward, Waring? Surely our shortest way to the coast is down to Kimberley and so on to the Cape. It'll take us weeks and weeks to reach the sea, won't it, by way of Namaqua land?"

"No matter for that," Guy replied, with confidence. He knew the map pretty well, and had thought it all over. "As soon as the Barolong miss us in the morning, they'll naturally think we've gone south, as you say, towards our own people. So they'll pursue us in that direction and try to take us; and if they were to catch us after we'd once run away, you may be sure they'd kill us as soon as look at us. But it would never occur to them, don't you see, we were going away west. They won't follow us that way. So west we'll go, and strike out for the sea, as I say, at Angra Pequena."

They sat up through the night discussing plans low to themselves in the dark, till nearly two in the morning. Then, when all was silent around, and the Barolong slept, they stole quietly out, and began their long march across the country to westward. Each man had his diamonds tied tightly round his waist, and his revolver at his belt. They were prepared to face every unknown danger.

Crawling past the native huts with very cautious steps, they made for the open, and emerged from the village on to the heights that bounded the valley of the Lugura. They had proceeded in this direction for more than an hour, walking as hard as their legs would carry them, when the sound of a man running fast, but barefoot, fell on their ears from behind in a regular pit-a-pat. Guy looked back in dismay, and saw a naked Barolong just silhouetted against the pale sky on the top of a long low ridge they had lately crossed over. At the very same instant Granville raised his revolver and pointed it at the man, who evidently had not yet perceived them. With a sudden gesture of horror, Guy knocked down his hand and prevented his taking aim.

"Don't shoot," he cried, in a voice of surprised dismay and disapproval. "We mustn't take his life. How do we know he's an enemy at all? He mayn't be pursuing us."

"Best shoot on spec, anyway," Granville answered, somewhat discomposed. "All's fair in war. The fellow's after us no doubt. And, at any rate, if he sees us he may go and report our whereabouts to the village."

"What? shoot an unarmed man who shows no signs of hostility! Why, it would be sheer murder," Guy cried, with some horror. "We mustn't make our retreat on THOSE principles, Kelmscott; it'd be quite indefensible. I decline to fire except when we're attacked. I won't be any party, myself, to needless bloodshed."

Granville Kclmscott gazed at him, there in the grey dawn, in unspeakable surprise. Not shoot at a negro! In such straits, too, as theirs! And this rebuke had come to him—from the mouth of the murderer!

Turn it over as he might, Granville couldn't understand it.

The Barolong ran along on the crest of the ridge, still at the top of his speed, without seeming to notice them in the gloom of the valley. Presently, he disappeared over the edge to southward. Guy was right, after all. He wasn't in pursuit of them. More likely he was only a runaway slave, taking advantage, like themselves, of King Khatsua's absence.



CHAPTER XXXV.

PERILS BY THE WAY.



Three weeks later, two torn and tattered, half-starved Europeans sat under a burning South African sun by the dry bed of a shrunken summer torrent. It was in the depths of Namaqua land, among the stony Karoo; and the fugitives were straggling, helplessly and hopelessly, seaward, thirsty and weary, through a half-hostile country, making their marches as best they could at dead of night and resting by day where the natives would permit them.

Their commissariat had indeed been a lean and hungry one. Though they carried many thousand pounds' worth of diamonds about their persons, they had nothing negotiable with which to buy food or shelter from the uncivilized Namaquas. Ivory, cloth, and beads were the currency of the country. No native thereabouts would look for a moment at their little round nobs of water-worn pebbles. The fame of the diamond fields hadn't penetrated as yet so far west in the land as to have reached to the huts of the savage Namaquas.

And now their staying power was almost worn out Granville Kelmscott lay down on the sandy soil with a wild gesture of despair. All around were bare rocks and the dry sweltering veldts, covered only with round stones and red sand and low bushy vegetation.

"Waring," he said feebly, in a very faint voice, "I wish you'd leave me and go on by yourself. I'm no good any more. I'm only a drag upon you. This fever's too bad for me to stand much longer. I can never pull through to the coast alive. I've no energy left, were it even to try. I'd like to lie down here and die where I sit. Do go and leave me."

"Never!" Guy answered resolutely. "I'll never desert you, Kelmscott, while I've a drop of blood left. If I carry you on my back to the coast, I'll get you there at last, or else we'll both die on the veldt together."

Granville held his friend's hand in his own fevered fingers as he might have held a woman's.

"Oh, Waring," he cried once more, in a voice half choked with profound emotion, "I don't know how to thank you enough for all you've done for me. You've behaved to me like a brother—like a brother indeed. It makes me ashamed to think, when I see how unselfish, and good, and kind you've been—ashamed to think I once distrusted you. You've been an angel to me all through. Without you, I don't know how I could ever have lived on through this journey at all. And I can't bear to feel now I may spoil your retreat—can't bear to know I'm a drag and burden to you."

"My dear fellow," Guy said, holding the thin and fevered hand very tenderly in his, "don't talk to me like that. I feel to you every bit as you feel to me in this matter. I was afraid of you at first, because I knew you misunderstood me. But the more I've seen of you, the better we've each of us learned to sympathize with the other. We've long been friends. I love you now, as you say, like a brother."

Granville hesitated for a moment. Should he out with it or not? Then at last the whole long-suppressed truth came out with a burst. He seized his companion's two hands at once in a convulsive grasp.

"That's not surprising either," he said, "after all—for Guy, do you know, we ARE really brothers!"

Guy gazed at him in astonishment. For a moment he thought his friend's reason was giving way. Then slowly and gradually he took it all in.

"ARE really brothers!" he repeated, in a dazed sort of way. "Do you mean it, Kelmscott? Then my father and Cyril's—"

"Was mine too, Waring. Yes; I couldn't bear to die without telling you that. And I tell it now to you. You two are the heirs of the Tilgate estates. And the unknown person who paid six thousand pounds to Cyril, just before you left England, was your father and mine—Colonel Henry Kelmscott."

Guy bent over him for a few seconds in speechless surprise. Words failed him at first. "How do you know all this, Kelmscott?" he said at last faintly.

Granville told him in as few words as possible—for indeed he was desperately weak and ill—by what accident he had discovered his father's secret. But he told him only what he knew himself. For, of course, he was ignorant as yet of the Colonel's seizure and sudden death on the very day after they had sailed from England.

Guy listened to it all in profound silence. It was a strange, and for him a momentous tale. Then he said at last, as Granville finished, "And you never told me this all these long months, Kelmscott."

"I always meant to tell you, Guy," his half-brother answered, in a sudden fit of penitence. "I always meant in the end you and your brother Cyril should come into your own at Tilgate as you ought. I was only waiting—"

"Till you'd realized enough to make good some part of your personal loss," Guy suggested, not unkindly.

"Oh no," Granville answered, flushing up at the suggestion. "I wasn't waiting for that. Don't think me so mercenary. I was waiting for YOU, in your turn to extend to ME your own personal confidence. You know, Guy," he went on, dropping into a still more hushed and solemn undertone, "I saw an evening paper the night we left Plymouth—"

"Oh, I know, I know," Guy cried, interrupting him, with a very pale face. "Don't speak to me of that. I can't bear to think of it. Kelmscott, I was mad when I did that deed. I wasn't myself. I acted under somebody else's compulsion and influence. The man had a sort of hypnotic power over my will, I believe. I couldn't help doing whatever he ordered me. It was he who suggested it. It was he that did it. And it's he who was really and truly guilty."

"And who was that man?" Granville Kelmscott asked with some little curiosity.

"There's no reason I shouldn't tell you," Guy answered, "now we've once broken the ice; and I'm glad in my heart, I must say, that we've broken it. For a year and a half, day and night, that barrier has been raised between us always, and I've longed to get rid of it. But I was afraid to speak of it to you, and you to me! Well, the man, if you must know, was Montague Nevitt!"

Granville Kelmscott looked up at him in credulous surprise. But he was too ill and weak to ask the meaning of this riddle. Montague Nevitt! What on earth could Waring mean by that? How on earth could Montague Nevitt have influenced and directed him in assaulting and murdering Montague Nevitt?

For a long time there was silence. Each brother was thinking his own thoughts to himself about this double disclosure. At last, Granville lifted his head and spoke again.

"And you'll go home to England now," he said, "under an assumed name, I suppose; and arrange with your brother Cyril for him to claim the Kelmscott estates, and allow you something out of them in retirement somewhere."

"Oh no," Guy answered manfully. "I'm going home to England now, if I go at all, under my own proper name that I've always borne, to repay Cyril in full every penny I owe him, to make what reparation I can for the wrong I've done, and to give myself up to the police for trial."

Granville gazed at him, more surprised and more admiring than ever.

"You're a brave man, Waring," he said slowly. "I don't understand it at all. But I know you're right. And I almost believe you. I almost believe it was not your fault. I should like to get through to England after all, if it was only to see you safe out of your troubles."

Guy looked at him fixedly.

"My dear fellow," he said, in a compassionate tone, "you mustn't talk any more. You've talked a great deal too much already. I see a hut, I fancy, over yonder, beside that dark patch of brush. Now, you must do exactly as I bid you. Don't struggle or kick. Lie as still as you can. I'll carry you there on my back, and then we'll see if we can get you anyhow a drop of pure water."



CHAPTER XXXVI.

DESERTED.



That was almost the last thing Granville Kelmscott knew. Some strange shadowy dreams, to be sure, disturbed the lethargy into which he fell soon after; but they were intermittent and indefinite. He was vaguely aware of being lifted with gentle care into somebody's arms, and of the somebody staggering along with him, not without considerable difficulty, over the rough stony ground of that South African plateau. He remembered also, as in a trance, some sound of angry voices—a loud expostulation—a hasty palaver—a long slow pause—a gradual sense of reconciliation and friendliness—during all which, as far as he could recover the circumstances afterwards, he must have been extended on the earth, with his back propped against a great ledge of jutting rock, and his head hanging listless on his sinking breast. Thenceforward all was blank, or just dimly perceived at long intervals between delirium and unconsciousness. He was ill for many days, where or how he knew not.

In some half dreamy way, he was aware too, now and again, of strange voices by his side, strange faces tending him. But they were black faces, all, and the voices spoke in deep guttural tones, unlike even the clicks and harsh Bantu jerks with which he had grown so familiar in eighteen months among the Barolong. This that he heard now, or seemed to hear in his delirium, like distant sounds of water, was a wholly different and very much harsher tongue—the tongue of the Namaquas, in fact, though Granville was far too ill and too drowsy just then to think of reasoning about it or classifying it in any way. All he knew for the moment was that sometimes, when he turned round feebly on his bed of straw, and asked for drink or help in a faltering voice, no white man appeared to answer his summons. Black, faces all—black, black, and unfamiliar. Very intermittently he was conscious of a faint sense of loneliness. He knew not why. But he thought he could guess. Guy Waring had deserted him!

At last, one morning, after more days had passed than Granville could possibly count, all of a sudden, in a wild whirl, he came to himself again at once, with that instant revulsion of complete awakening which often occurs at the end of long fits of delirium in malarious fever. A light burst in upon him with a flash. In a moment, his brain seemed to clear all at once, and everything to grow plain as day before him. He raised himself on one wasted elbow and gazed around him with profound awe. He saw it all now; he remembered everything, everything.

He was alone, among savages in the far heart of Africa.

He lay on his back, on a heap of fresh straw, in a close and filthy mud-built hut. Under his aching neck a wooden pillow or prop of native make supported his head. Two women and a man bent over him and smiled. Their faces, though black, were far from unkindly. They were pleased to see him stare about with such meaning in his eyes. They were friendly, no doubt. They seemed really to take an interest in their patient's recovery.

But where was Guy Waring? Dead? Dead? Or run away? Had his half-brother, in this utmost need, then, so basely deserted him?

For some minutes, Granville gazed around him, half dazed, and in a turmoil of surprise, yet with a vivid passion of acute inquiry. Now he was once well awake, he must know all immediately. But how? Who to ask? This was terrible, terrible. He had no means of intercommunication with the people in the hut. He knew none of their language, nor they of his. He was utterly alone, among unmitigated savages.

Meanwhile, the man and the women talked loud among themselves in their own harsh speech, evidently well pleased and satisfied at their guest's improvement. With a violent effort, Granville began to communicate with them in the language of signs which every savage knows as he knows his native tongue, and in which the two Englishmen had already made some progress during their stay in Barolong land.

Pointing first to himself, with one hand on his breast, he held up two fingers before the observant Namaqua, to indicate that at first there had been a couple of them on the road, both white men. The latter point he still further elaborated by showing the white skin on his own bare wrist, and once more holding up the two fingers demonstratively. The Namaqua nodded. He had seized the point well. He held up two fingers in return himself; then looked at his own black wrist and shook his head in dissent—they were not black men; after which he touched Granville's fair forearm with his hand; yes, yes, just so; he took it in; two white men.

What had become of the other one? Granville asked in the same fashion, by looking around him on all sides in dumb show, inquiringly. One finger only was held up now, pointing about the hut; one hand was laid upon his own breast to show that a single white man alone remained. He glanced about him uneasily. What had happened to his companion?

The Namaqua pointed with his finger to the door of the hut, as much as to say the other man was gone. He seized every sign at once with true savage quickness.

Then Granville tried once more. Was his companion dead? Had he been killed in a fight? Was that the reason of his absence? He lunged forward with his hand holding an imaginary assegai. He pressed on upon the foe; he drove it through a body. Then he fell, as if dead, on the floor, with a groan and a shriek. After which, picking himself up as well as he was able, and crawling back to his straw, he proceeded in mute pantomime to bury himself decently.