lves. And in my mingled scare and surprise the
other day, out it came."

"We have been through a good deal together during the last four days,"
he said, "including one of the narrowest shaves for our lives we can
ever possibly again experience. Heaven knows how long we are destined
to roam the wilds together, but why not keep the conventional until our
return to conventionality?"

"Very well," she answered.

It was even as he had said. This was the afternoon of the fourth day
after leaving Shiminya's den, and now they were well in among the Matopo
range. Here, if anywhere, amid this vast sea of jumbled boulders and
granite cones and wide rocky hollows, they would be comparatively safe,
if only they kept a constant and careful look out, John Ames declared.
The open country would be swarming with rebels, and it was not
improbable that Bulawayo itself was in a state of siege. Here, where
almost every stone represented a hiding-place, they could lie _perdu_
for any time; and such was far the safer course, at any rate until able
to gain some inkling of what had really transpired, as to which they
were so far in complete ignorance. If the Matabele had risen upon
Bulawayo with the same secrecy and suddenness wherewith they had
surprised outlying stations, why, the capital would be absolutely at
their mercy, in which case the only whites left alive in the land would
be stray fugitives like themselves. Indeed, to John Ames it seemed too
much to hope that any other state of things could be the prevalent one,
wherefore for the present these rugged and seldom trodden fastnesses
afforded the securest of all refuges. This plan he had put to Nidia,
and she had agreed at once.

"Do not even go to the trouble of consulting me," she had said. "Always
act exactly as you think best. What do I know about things here, and
where would I have been now but for you?"

"You showed yourself full of resource before I came on the scene,
anyway. You might have pulled through just as well."

"No; I should never have been able to keep it up. Heavens! where would
I have been?"--looking round upon the wilderness and realising its
sombre vastness. "But with you I feel almost as safe as I did--well,
this day last week."

As he had said, they had indeed been a great deal together during the
past four days, really a great deal more so than during the three weeks
and upwards that they had known each other down-country. Hiding away in
sl