In the afternoon he took his way down to Booyseus. Would he find Lilith
in? It was almost too much good luck to hope to find her alone. As he
walked, he was filled with a strange elation. The dull pain of a very
near parting was largely counteracted by the manner of it. Such a
parting had been before his mind for long; but then he would have gone
forth broken down, ruined, more utterly without hope in life than ever.
Now it was different. He was going forth upon an adventure fraught with
all manner of stirring potentialities--one from which he would return
wealthy, or, as his friend and thenceforth comrade had said, one from
which he would not return at all.

Had his luck already begun to turn, he thought? As he mounted the
_stoep_ Lilith herself came forth to meet him. It struck him that the
omen was a good one.

"Why, you are becoming quite a stranger," she said. But the note of
gladness underlying the reproach did not escape him, nor a certain
lighting up of her face as they clasped hands, with the subtile
lingering pressure now never absent from that outwardly formal method of
greeting.

"Am I?" he answered, thinking how soon, how very soon, he would become
one in reality. "But you were going out?" For she had on her hat and
gloves, and carried a sunshade.

"I was. You are only just in time--only just. But I won't now that you
have come."

"On the contrary, I want you to. I want you to come out with me, and at
once, before an irruption of bores renders that manoeuvre
impracticable. Will you?"

"Of course I will. Which way shall we go? Up to the town?"

"Not much. Right in the opposite direction, and as far away from it as
possible. Are you alone?"

"Not quite alone. Aunt is having her afternoon sleep; but May and George
went to the town this morning. They intended to have lunch at the
Stevensons', and then go on to the cricket ground. There's a match or
something on to-day. George was cross because I wouldn't go too; but I
had a touch of headache, and went to sleep instead. And oh, Laurence, I
had such a horrible dream. It was about you."

"Oh, was it?" The words rapped themselves out quickly, nervously, more
so than she had ever heard him talk before. But the awful and ghastly
crisis of the morning was recalled by her words. "About me? Tell it to
me."

"I can't. It was all rather vague, and yet so real. I dreamed that you
were in the face of some strange, some horrible danger, against which I
was p