r bed, her back towards him. Her face was buried in
her hands, and her whole form was heaving with low convulsive sobs.

"Lyn! Great Heaven! What's the matter? Lyn--My little Lyn!"

She rose at her father's voice and came straight into his arms. Then
she looked up at him, through her tears, forcing a smile.

"My little one, what is it? There, there, tell your old father," he
pleaded, a whirlwind of tenderness and concern shaking his voice as he
held her to him. "Tell me, sweetheart."

"It's nothing, dearest," she answered but quaveringly, and still forcing
herself to smile. "Only--No, it's nothing. But--when people are here a
long time, and you get to like them a lot and they go away--why it's--
oh, it's beastly. That's all, old father--" dashing away her tears, and
forcing herself to smile in real earnest. "And I'm a little fool,
that's all. But I won't be any more. See, I'm all right now."

"My little Lyn! My own little one!" he repeated, kissing her tenderly,
now rather more moved than she was.

And Lyn was as good as her word. All his solicitous but furtive
watching, failed to detect any sign or symptom that her outburst of
grief was anything more than a perfectly natural and childlike
manifestation of her warm little heart.

And yet, there were times, when, recurring to it in his own mind, honest
George Bayfield would grow grave and shake his head and ejaculate softly
to himself:

"My little Lyn! No--it can't be. Oh, Great Scot!"

End of Book II.

CHAPTER ONE.

"WOZ'UBONE, KITI KWAZULU."

Lo Bengula sat within the _esibayaneni_--the sacred enclosure wherein
none dare intrude--at his great kraal, Bulawayo.

The occupation on which the King was then engaged, was the homely and
prosaic one of eating his breakfast. This consisted of a huge dish of
_bubende_, being certain ingredients of the internal mechanism of the
bullock, all boiled up with the blood, to the civilised palate an
appalling article of diet, but highly favoured by the Matabele. Yet,
while devouring this delicacy with vast appetite, the royal countenance
was overcast and gloomy in the extreme.

Lo Bengula sat alone. From without a continuous roar of many voices
reached him. It was never hushed, the night through it had hardly been
hushed, and this was early morning. Song after song, some improvised,
others the old war-songs of the nation, interluded with long _paeans_ of
his own praises, rising from the untiring