nto the red surroundings of massacre and of death. Again,
the circumstances of her wanderings appealed strongly to the romantic
side, and people looked knowingly at each other, and pronounced John
Ames to be a singularly fortunate individual--would be, at least, were
it not for the fact that nobody knew whether he was alive or dead;
indeed, the latter contingency seemed the more probable.

There was one to whom Nidia's reappearance was as little short of
restoration to life for herself, and that one was Mrs Bateman, for to
her the girl was more than all the world put together--far more than her
own husband, and she had no children. When the first tidings of the
outbreak, and the massacre of the Hollingworths, had come in, the poor
woman had been simply frantic. The fact that Nidia had not been
included in the tragedy, but had disappeared, brought with it small
comfort. She pictured her darling in the power of brutal savages, or
wandering alone in the wilderness to perish miserably of starvation and
exhaustion; perhaps, even, to fall a prey to wild animals. Was it for
this she had allowed her to leave her English home "for a peep into wild
life," as they had put it when the much debated question had arisen?
Not even the dreadful task of breaking the news to Nidia's relatives
occurred to her now, her grief was too whole-hearted, too unmixed. Her
husband came in for a convenient safety-valve, though. Why had he
induced either of them to come near such a hateful country? He was the
real murderer, not these vile savages; and having with admirable and
usual feminine logic clapped the saddle on the wrong horse to her
heart's content, and caused that estimable engineer mildly to wish he
had never been born, she hunted him off with one of the relief forces,
together with every man she could succeed in pressing into her service.
Indeed, it used to be said that, could she have had her way, just about
every available man in Bulawayo would have been started off on that
particular search, leaving all the other women and children, herself
included, to take their chance. And then, when her grief had reached
the acutest pitch of desperation, the missing girl had been found.
Thenceforward nothing mattered. The place might be attacked nightly by
all the Matabele in Rhodesia for all she cared. She had got her darling
back again.

Back again--yes. But this was not the same Nidia. The bright sunny
flow of spirits was gone, like