irmness of purpose,
and when she compared herself with him she felt unworthy. She treasured
every recollection she had of him. She went over in her mind all that
she had heard him say, and reconstructed the conversations they had had
together. She walked where they had walked, remembering how the sky had
looked on those days and what flowers then bloomed in the parks; she
visited the galleries they had seen in one another's company, and stood
before the pictures which he had lingered at. And notwithstanding all
there was to torment and humiliate her, she was happy. Something had
come into her life which made all else tolerable. It was easy to bear
the extremity of grief when he loved her.

After a long time Dick received a letter from Alec. MacKenzie was not a
good letter-writer. He had no gift of self-expression, and when he had a
pen in his hand seemed to be seized with an invincible shyness. The
letter was dry and wooden. It was dated from the last trading-station
before he set out into the wild country which was to be the scene of his
operations. It said that hitherto everything had gone well with him, and
the white men, but for fever occasionally, were bearing the climate
well. One, named Macinnery, had made a nuisance of himself, and had been
sent back to the coast. Alec gave no reasons for this step. He had been
busy making the final arrangements. A company had been formed, the North
East Africa Trading Company, to exploit the commercial possibilities of
these unworked districts, and a charter had been given them; but the
unsettled state of the land had so hampered them that the directors had
gladly accepted Alec's offer to join their forces with his, and the
traders at their stations had been instructed to take service under him.
This increased the white men under his command to sixteen. He had
drilled the Swahilis whom he had brought from the coast, and given them
guns, so that he had now an armed force of four hundred men. He was
collecting levies from the native tribes, and he gave the outlandish
names of the chiefs, armed with spears, who were to accompany him. The
power of Mohammed the Lame was on the wane; for, during the three months
which Alec had spent in England, an illness had seized him, which the
natives asserted was a magic spell cast on him by one of his wives; and
a son of his, taking advantage of this, had revolted and fortified
himself in a stockade. The dying Sultan had taken the field against