The poor fellow has been
ill--fearfully ill--believes he would have died, but for a stranger who
turned up quite unexpectedly, but just in the nick of time, and nursed
him through it. It was a return of his old fever."

"By Jove!" said Christopher, "that up-country fever is the very mischief
once you get it on you. But, Hilda, write and tell him to come down
here sharp--whether he leaves his few goats or not. They're bound to
die anyhow. This air will set him up on his legs again in no time--and
meanwhile he can be looking around. Tell him to bring his friend too.
By the way, what's the other man's name?"

"He doesn't say--only that he's a man from England. I'll write this
very evening," she answered.

Violet Avory's prettily expressed concern was but the foreground to an
instinctive inward conjecture as to what the stranger would be like.
Poor Renshaw's illness was not an event to move her much, and poor
Renshaw himself faded into background beside the possibilities opening
out before her in the advent of a stranger--a stranger from England too.
Truth to tell, she was becoming a trifle bored. The incense of male
adoration, as essential to her as the very breath of life, had not
floated much in her direction of late; for the Umtirara range, though
scenically and climatically a comparative Eden, was yet to all purposes,
as far as she was concerned, an Adamless one. A stranger--lately from
England! There was something delightfully exciting in the
potentialities here opening out.

"Tell him he must come, Hilda!" said Marian, with, for her, a strange
eagerness. "Poor--poor Renshaw! He'll never shake off that horrible
fever up there in such an awful drought-stricken desert. Tell him he
must come, and come at once!"

And yet of these two it was for her who was moved to excitement over the
possible arrival of a stranger, that the absent man would have given his
very life--blindly, as with regard to the treasure for which he had been
so blindly and so often seeking--hitherto in vain.

CHAPTER SIX.

RELAPSE.

The sun was at least four hours high when the stranger awoke.

His night of watching coming upon the exhaustion and fatigue of his long
and arduous journey of the previous day had gradually overpowered him,
and towards dawn he had sunk into a series of dozes, troubled and
uneasy; for the events of the night kept chasing each other in wild
medley through his slumbers, assuming every form of weird a