, or something like that; I am sure I'm not."

Lady Cantourne was addressing an envelope, and did not make any reply.

"Has he said anything to you, Aunt Caroline?" asked Millicent in an
aggrieved voice.

Lady Cantourne laid aside her letter.

"No," she answered slowly, "but I suppose there are things which he does
not understand."

"Things?"

Her ladyship looked up steadily.

"Guy Oscard, for instance," she said; "I don't quite understand Guy
Oscard, Millicent."

The girl turned away impatiently. She was keenly alive to the advantage
of turning her face away. For in her pocket she had at that moment a
letter from Guy Oscard--the last relic of the old excitement which was
so dear to her, and which she was already beginning to miss. Joseph had
posted this letter in Msala nearly two months before. It had travelled
down from the Simiacine Plateau with others, in a parcel beneath the
mattress of Jack Meredith's litter. It was a letter written in good
faith by an honest, devoted man to the woman whom he looked upon already
as almost his wife--a letter which no man need have been ashamed of
writing, but which a woman ought not to have read unless she intended to
be the writer's wife.

Millicent had read this letter more than once. She liked it because it
was evidently sincere. The man's heart could be heard beating in every
line of it. Moreover, she had made inquiries that very morning at the
Post Office about the African mail. She wanted the excitement of another
letter like that.

"Oh, Guy Oscard!" she replied innocently to Lady Cantourne; "that was
nothing."

Lady Cantourne kept silence, and presently she returned to her letters.

CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE ACCURSED CAMP

Here--judge if hell, with all its power to damn,
Can add one curse to the foul thing I am--

There are some places in the world where a curse seems to brood in the
atmosphere. Msala was one of these. Perhaps these places are accursed by
the deeds that have been done there. Who can tell?

Could the trees--the two gigantic palms that stood by the river's
edge--could these have spoken, they might perhaps have told the tale of
this little inland station in that country where, as the founder of the
hamlet was in the habit of saying, no one knows what is going on.

All went well with the retreating column until they were almost in
sight of Msala, when the flotilla was attacked by no less than three
hippopotamuses. One canoe was