assent, "Oh, I am glad!"

And then all of Nidia's old self seemed to return. She poured forth
question upon question, hardly waiting to be answered. How had he
escaped? Where was he, and when was he coming to see her? and so on--
and so on.

"He's rather close on the subject, Miss Commerell," Tarrant replied.
"He has a yarn about being chevvied by niggers and tumbling over a
_dwala_, and lying unconscious--and then some niggers who knew him
piloting him in. He asked after you the first thing, just as if you had
never been away from here; and the odd part of it is, he didn't seem in
the least surprised to hear you were safe and sound, and quite all
right."

But the oddness of John Ames' lack of astonishment did not strike Nidia
just then. She talked on, quite in her old way--now freely, too--on the
subject of her escape and wanderings, making much of the humorous side
thereof, and more of the judgment and courage and resource of her guide.
Her voice had a glad note about it; a very carol of joy and relief
seemed to ring out in every tone. Ever unconventional, it never
occurred to her to make the slightest attempt to disguise her feelings.
If she was glad that the man who had done so much for her had returned
safe and sound, it was not in her to conceal that fact.

"Phew! she's giving away the show," Tarrant was thinking to himself.
"That first shot of mine _re_ John Ames was a plumb centre. I'll have
the crow over old Moseley now. Lucky John Ames!"

But at heart he was conscious of a certain not altogether to be
controlled sinking. He was not without a weakness for Nidia himself;
now, however, in a flash he recognised its utter futility, and was far
too much a man of the world not to realise that the sooner he cured
himself of it the better.

Upon one other the change in Nidia's manner was not lost, and the
discovery struck Susie Bateman with such wild amazement that she at
first refused to entertain it. Here, then, lay the secret of the girl's
fits of depression and generally low spirits. Such were not due to her
recent terrible experiences. She had been secretly grieving on account
of the man who had shared them, or why this sudden and almost miraculous
restoration which the news of his safety had effected? She recalled her
half-playful, half-serious warning to Nidia during their earlier
acquaintance with this man--a warning more than once repeated, too.
That had been out of consideration for the m