s; Clare has
struck her flag at last, Lucy. Lamont's captured her."

"Oh, go easy, Dick. I won't have Clare teased," was all the response he
got in the conjugal quarter.

"She seems jolly well able to take care of herself anyhow," pronounced
her brother-in-law resentfully.

"I like fair play," rejoined the girl, "and a great many of you don't
seem to know the meaning of the word. Because somebody says one thing,
and somebody else another about a man who is really too much of a man to
bother himself about it--you all go to work to make him out this and to
make him out that. You're worse than a pack of spiteful women."

Oh, how she longed to tell them all she knew--how the man they were
decrying had spent the day watching over the safety of all present, how
his cool nerve and unflagging resource had averted from them the ghastly
peril that threatened. But this she could not do. She was bound over
to absolute and entire secrecy.

"By Jingo, I'll tell you another thing now," said Fullerton. "Blest if
I didn't meet this very chap, Lamont, at the bend of the road, just
beyond the house, at twelve o'clock last night--you know, just after
those fellows left us. He was strolling this way, and he'd got a
Lee-Metford magazine rifle. I asked him what the deuce he was playing
at sentry-go like that for, and he grunted something about getting his
hand in, whatever that might mean; and when I wanted him to come in and
have a whisky--for you can't be inhospitable even though you don't care
much for a fellow--he wouldn't, because he was afraid of scaring you all
if you saw him with a rifle at that time of night, and of course he
wouldn't leave it outside. What was he up to, that's the question. I
own it stumps me."

"Ah!" said Clare, with a provoking smile. "What _was_ he up to?"

But a new light had swept in upon her mind. In view of what she had
learned that morning there was nothing eccentric about this lonely
watcher and his midnight vigil. And yet--and yet--why should he have
singled out Richard Fullerton's house as the special object of his
self-imposed guardianship?

Meanwhile a sort of council of war was going on elsewhere. It consisted
of four persons, Orwell the Resident Magistrate, Isard the officer in
command of the Mounted Police stationed at Gandela, Driffield the Native
Commissioner, and Lamont. To the other three the latter had just
unfolded his tale of the conspiracy, and the steps he had taken