y the boulder-cairn. He smiled. What an easy
solution of the problem! He had been too intent upon gratifying her last
desire to entertain for a moment the thought of suicide. He had always
held self-destruction as the last resource of the coward and the criminal,
and besides there was the child.

The child!...

With a pang of dread and terror unfelt by him before, he raised his gaunt
head with an effort from the uneasy pillow, and looked towards where she
lay, with staring, haunted eyes. The window was open a little way at the
top, and for fear of the night-chill his fine leopard-skin kaross had been
spread over her.... One dimpled, rounded, bare arm lay upon the soft
dappled fur, the babyish fingers curled one upon the other. Rosy human
tendrils that should never twine again in a mother's hair. Her child, her
daughter!... Born of her body, sharing her nature and her sex, soon to be
orphaned. For he who could not even lift himself from bed, and drag his
body across the floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, would soon be no
better protector than the restless ghost that tugged at his heart with its
unseen hands. He knew now why it could not rest.

What would become of the child! Another fiery scourge, wielded by the Hand
Unseen, bit deep into his shrinking conscience, into his writhing soul.
His own act had brought this about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny, blame
Fate, lay the onus upon God, as so many defaulters do--he could not. He
lay looking his deed in the foul face until the dawn crept up the sky, and
learning how it may be that the sins of their fathers are visited on the
children.

He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, and with
infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent strength and breath, for
he was greedy of life now, for the reason that we know--he wrote a letter
home to England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a
great historic title--so great that those who spelled it out upon the
envelope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the crested seal.
But Bough did it, and opened, and read.

It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it would be good
enough. Wires might be pulled from Downing Street that would set the
Government at Cape Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had
travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child
and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given up those almighty
s