n there's money to help it to make
itself quickly.'

He wished her good-bye and moved to the door. As he opened it he said,
'By the way, is the date of the marriage fixed?' but without turning
towards her.

She said, 'Yes, the 8th of December,' and she saw his shoulders brace,
and the weight of his body come backwards from the ball of the foot on
to the heel.

'Ah! I shall be in Africa by then,' he said.

It was in fact near upon the end of February that the river-steamer
plying between the settlement and the coast of Matanga brought to Drake
and Fielding an announcement that the marriage had taken place. There
were letters for both the men, and they carried them out to a grass knoll
on the edge of the forest some quarter of a mile away from the little
village of tin huts which shone in the sunshine like a tidy kitchen, as
Fielding was used to say. Drake read his through, and said to Fielding,
'You have a letter from Mrs. Willoughby?'

'Yes.'

'Any news?'

Fielding looked him in the face. 'Yes,' he said slowly, and putting the
letter in his pocket, buttoned it up. Drake understood alike from his
tone and action what news the letter conveyed, and made no further
inquiry. He fell instead to talking of some machinery which the boat had
brought up along with the letters. The letter, indeed, was written in a
vein which made it impossible for Fielding to follow the usual habit of
reading Mrs. Willoughby's letters aloud to his companion. 'The wedding,'
she wrote, 'lacked nothing but a costumier and a composer. The bride and
bridegroom should have been in fancy dress, and a new Gounod was needed
to compose the wedding-march of a marionette. One might have taken the
ceremony seriously as an artistic whole under those circumstances.'

Mrs. Willoughby continued to keep Fielding informed of the progress or
the married couple, and in May hinted at dissensions. The hint Fielding
let slip one day to Drake. Drake, however, received the news with
apparent indifference, and indeed returned to England in September with
Fielding without having so much as referred to the subject.

During the month which followed his return, he preserved the same
appearance of indifference, seeming, indeed, thoroughly engrossed in
working off arrears of business. The fact, however, of this dissension
was thrust before his notice one evening when he dined with Mr. Le
Mesurier, and that gentleman dealt out extravagant praise to the French
for recog