a detachment of the guard enter the
palace and bring M'Bongwele forth to hear his sentence!"

In an instant Lualamba--anxious above all things to please the powers
that be, and having, moreover, in revengeful remembrance many little
gratuitous slights and insults which he had suffered at the king's
hands--dismounted a squadron of the guard, and, surrounding the palace,
himself entered the building at the head of half a dozen men. Two or
three minutes later the party reappeared with the dethroned monarch in
their midst. They advanced until almost level with the spot occupied by
Seketulo, when, at a sign from the professor, they halted; the guards
disposing themselves round M'Bongwele in such a manner that, whilst to
escape was an utter impossibility, he could still see and hear the
individual who, perched far aloft in the gangway of the ship, was about
to address him.

M'Bongwele never, perhaps, looked more kingly than whilst he thus stood
to receive his sentence of dethronement. He was fully conscious of his
treacherous behaviour to his guests, but he felt no shame thereat, for
he had been schooled in the belief that treachery, falsehood, ay, even
deliberate, cold-blooded murder, was perfectly justifiable in the
pursuit of power. His only feeling was that he had played a bold game
for a high stake and had lost it. The moment of reckoning had now
arrived, the penalty of failure had to be paid, and though he knew not
what that penalty might be--though his brain was teeming with all sorts
of possible and impossible horrors--he never for a moment forgot that he
was a monarch, that the eyes of his people were on him, noting his every
look and gesture, and he summoned all his fortitude to his aid, in order
that, since fall he must, he should fall as becomes a king.

So there he stood in the bright sunlight of the early morning--an
unarmed man, surrounded by those who, whilst they would yesterday have
poured out their heart's blood at his command, were now prepared to hew
him in pieces at the bidding of a white-skinned stranger--with arms
folded across the muscular naked chest which throbbed visibly with the
intensity of his hardly repressed emotions, his head thrown back, his
brows knitted, his lips firmly closed over his rigidly set teeth, and
his eyes unquailingly fixed upon the group of white men whom he
recognised and tacitly acknowledged as his conquerors and judges. And
when the sentence of dethronement, separa