ar.

"Laurence!"

The name was hardly audible, but he heard it. And if his steely
philosophy had stood him in good stead before, assuredly at this moment
his guard was down; as he recognized that he had last beheld this serene
vision of loveliness, arrayed as now in cool white, strained to him in
farewell embrace alone in the solemn night, those parted lips pressed to
his in heart-wrung pain, those sweet eyes, starry, humid with love,
gazing full into his own. And now they met again, four years later--by
chance--in a busy thoroughfare.

"Pray excuse my inexcusable awkwardness; I must have hurt you," he said,
as they clasped hands, and the tone was even almost formal, for he
remembered they were in public.

"You--you--have changed. I should hardly have known you but for your
voice," she said unsteadily--for he had turned to walk up the street
with her. "But--when did you return? I--had not heard."

"Had you not? I called on your aunt in Johannesburg on the way through.
She was telling me all about you."

Something of relief seemed to manifest itself in Lilith's tone as she
rejoined:

"But you--are you staying here?"

"Well, no. I have been trying to kill time until this afternoon. I am
leaving by the _Alnwick Castle_."

"Oh! By the _Alnwick Castle_?" she repeated again--and in the catch in
her voice, and the quickness of utterance, he knew she was talking at
random, for the sake of saying something, in fact.

"Do you care to hear a little of what has befallen me since I went?" he
said. "Then let us turn in here," as she made a mute but eager gesture
of assent.

They had gained the entrance to the oak avenue at the back of Government
House. Strolling up this, they turned into the beautiful Botanical
Gardens. Nobody was about, save a gardener or two busied with their
work.

"What I am going to tell you is so marvellous that you will probably
refuse to believe it," he said, after narrating the incident of the sign
upon the metal box which had arrested the uplifted weapons of the
unsparing Ba-gcatya, and, of course, editing out all that might have
revealed the real nature of the expedition. "I have never breathed one
word of it to any living being--not even to those who were with me. I
would rather you did not either, Lilith, because it is too strange for
anybody to believe, and--for other reasons."

She gave the required promise, and he drew forth the box. At sight of
this relic of the past, that sweet, en