careful not to do so. And
then she was not sure that she loved him! That, too, came rather in
the nature of a shock to his vanity. It seemed incredible that this
little barbarian should have any doubts whatever as to the desirability
of the Hon. Morison Baynes.

The first flush of passion cooled, the Hon. Morison was enabled to
reason more logically. The start had been all wrong. It would be
better now to wait and prepare her mind gradually for the only
proposition which his exalted estate would permit him to offer her. He
would go slow. He glanced down at the girl's profile. It was bathed
in the silvery light of the great tropic moon. The Hon. Morison
Baynes wondered if it were to be so easy a matter to "go slow." She
was most alluring.

Meriem rose. The vision of Korak was still before her.

"Good night," she said. "It is almost too beautiful to leave," she
waved her hand in a comprehensive gesture which took in the starry
heavens, the great moon, the broad, silvered plain, and the dense
shadows in the distance, that marked the jungle. "Oh, how I love it!"

"You would love London more," he said earnestly. "And London would
love you. You would be a famous beauty in any capital of Europe. You
would have the world at your feet, Meriem."

"Good night!" she repeated, and left him.

The Hon. Morison selected a cigarette from his crested case, lighted
it, blew a thin line of blue smoke toward the moon, and smiled.

Chapter 18

Meriem and Bwana were sitting on the verandah together the following
day when a horseman appeared in the distance riding across the plain
toward the bungalow. Bwana shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed out
toward the oncoming rider. He was puzzled. Strangers were few in
Central Africa. Even the blacks for a distance of many miles in every
direction were well known to him. No white man came within a hundred
miles that word of his coming did not reach Bwana long before the
stranger. His every move was reported to the big Bwana--just what
animals he killed and how many of each species, how he killed them,
too, for Bwana would not permit the use of prussic acid or strychnine;
and how he treated his "boys."

Several European sportsmen had been turned back to the coast by the big
Englishman's orders because of unwarranted cruelty to their black
followers, and one, whose name had long been heralded in civilized
communities as that of a great sportsman, was driven