e, as Willoughby took his seat
beside her, and he had barely spoken a score of words before she broke
that promise.

"I am Deputy-Governor of Suakin," he began. "My chief was on leave in
May. You are fortunate enough not to know Suakin, Miss Eustace,
particularly in May. No white woman can live in that town. It has a
sodden intolerable heat peculiar to itself. The air is heavy with brine;
you can't sleep at night for its oppression. Well, I was sitting in the
verandah on the first floor of the palace about ten o'clock at night,
looking out over the harbour and the distillation works, and wondering
whether it was worth while to go to bed at all, when a servant told me
that a man, who refused to give his name, wished particularly to see me.
The man was Feversham. There was only a lamp burning in the verandah,
and the night was dark, so that I did not recognise him until he was
close to me."

And at once Ethne interrupted.

"How did he look?"

Willoughby wrinkled his forehead and opened his eyes wide.

"Really, I do not know," he said doubtfully. "Much like other men, I
suppose, who have been a year or two in the Soudan, a trifle overtrained
and that sort of thing."

"Never mind," said Ethne, with a sigh of disappointment. For five years
she had heard no word of Harry Feversham. She fairly hungered for news
of him, for the sound of his habitual phrases, for the description of
his familiar gestures. She had the woman's anxiety for his bodily
health, she wished to know whether he had changed in face or figure,
and, if so, how and in what measure. But she glanced at the obtuse,
unobservant countenance of Captain Willoughby, and she understood that
however much she craved for these particulars, she must go without.

"I beg your pardon," she said. "Will you go on?"

"I asked him what he wanted," Willoughby resumed, "and why he had not
sent in his name. 'You would not have seen me if I had,' he replied, and
he drew a packet of letters out of his pocket. Now, those letters, Miss
Eustace, had been written a long while ago by General Gordon in Khartum.
They had been carried down the Nile as far as Berber. But the day after
they reached Berber, that town surrendered to the Mahdists. Abou Fatma,
the messenger who carried them, hid them in the wall of the house of an
Arab called Yusef, who sold rock-salt in the market-place. Abou was then
thrown into prison on suspicion, and escaped to Suakin. The letters
remained hidden in