s Golconda was not the prevailing
motive this time. But, whatever it was, Renshaw, habitually reserved,
was closer than death itself.

Sellon, for his part, was as anxious to get away as his host. He was
thoroughly sick of his present quarters, and of the daily occupation of
seeing a few more wretched Angoras pay the debt of Nature--of staring at
the glassy, shimmering horizon, and wondering when it was going to rain.
Thoroughly sick, too, of swarming flies and of rough food none too
appetisingly displayed--of a sofa-bed, and falling asleep to the
accompaniment of the ticking rustle of the tarantulas hunting their prey
in the thatch overhead, and occasionally running over his ear in the
night. It was all very well for Fanning. He was used to that sort of
thing--Sellon was not; therefore small wonder that he should begin to
get sick of it. There wasn't even anything to shoot on the place, for
the springbok had trekked in quest of more favoured regions.

Sellon, however, was blessed with a mercurial temperament, as his host
had remarked, and the same now stood him in good stead, for, though
bored to death, he did not wax quarrelsome--the usual development of
that unenviable condition. But there was one matter which, haunting his
mind day and night, bade fair even to drive him into that.

He was racked by an hourly dread lest his friend should discover the
loss of the missing paper. Maurice Sellon was constitutionally as far
from being a coward as the average Englishman, well endowed with thews,
habitually is. But the consciousness that he had been guilty of a mean
and dishonest action tended to demoralise his easy self-reliance. A man
like Renshaw, the possessor of a secret of fabulous value, the clue to
which he had cherished for years, and patiently; and at the cost of
untold hardship and possible peril, had repeatedly attempted to solve,
would, he reasoned, prove a desperate man when he should come to realise
that his hopes were for ever shattered--a dangerous one, should he ever
arrive at the conviction that he had been deliberately robbed. The idea
of persuading him that he had himself insisted on destroying it during
his delirium seemed the only way out of the difficulty; but that
expedient now struck Sellon as a particularly thin one. Such a state of
mental nervousness had he reached, that he felt sure the other would at
once detect it as a lie. True, he had probably saved Fanning's life, as
the latte