n
terror and a couple of flashes of sheeny light, a result he certainly
had not intended, "All this. To lounge here at ease like this,
literally bathed in the scent of flowers, with a sound of running water
in one's ears, and of bird life, animal life, every sort of life, after
the dead, burnt-up, famine-stricken waste, watching day after day, month
after month, for the rain that doesn't come--seeing one's stock snuffing
out like flies with daily increasing regularity. Bah! It's enough to
drive a man mad."

"Why don't you give it up, Renshaw? Sell off your place and come and
try this part? Chris is always saying you could do much better
somewhere down here."

"And Chris is right. But selling off is easier said than done, let me
tell you. No one will so much as look at land investment up there--
and--I'm about cleaned out. As soon as I've picked up a little more in
form I'm off up country again. The interior. It's the only thing
left."

Marian's head bent down lower over her work, for her eyes were brimming.
Renshaw, busily engaged at that moment knocking the ashes out of his
pipe against the post of the verandah, was half turned away from her,
and, for good or for ill, the teardrop which fell upon her work escaped
him altogether. When he turned round again she had entirely recovered
her self-control.

"If that is your idea, you had better follow my advice and do all you
can to get strong again," she said. "For you cannot think of launching
out into an undertaking of that sort for some time to come. But--are
you going to make another attempt to find `The Valley'?"

Renshaw nodded.

"That's it!" he said. "By the way, you haven't let drop anything about
it to any one, Marian."

She felt hurt.

"I should have thought you knew me better than that. Ah, I see. Only a
woman, after all!" she added, with a smile. "That's what you were
thinking?"

"No. It came out instinctively. You must forgive me, Marian. I really
believe I'm half crazed on the subject of that confoundedly elusive
Golconda. Well, we shall find it this time."

"We?"

"Yes. I'm going to cut Sellon into the scheme. It's an undertaking
that'll carry two. Besides, he's a good fellow, and I owe him a turn
for pulling me through that fever."

"I'm sorry to tread upon your quixotic susceptibilities, Renshaw," said
Marian, after a brief pause, "but if you were not as astoundingly
unselfish as most of us are the other way, it migh