to him that she was a nice girl. For she
listened for hours to him lecturing her on the proper way to treat
Dick without the slightest irritation and with only a faintly visible
amusement. Besides she insisted on returning with her husband to Bonny
river, which was a sufficiently courageous thing to undertake.

For a year in spite of the climate the couple were commonplace and
happy. For a year Walker clucked about them like a hen after its
chickens and slept the sleep of the untroubled. Then he returned to
England and from that time made only occasional journeys to West
Africa. Thus for awhile he almost lost sight of Hatteras and
consequently still slept the sleep of the untroubled. One morning,
however, he arrived unexpectedly at the settlement and at once called
on Hatteras. He did not wait to be announced, but ran up the steps
outside the house and into the dining-room. He found Mrs. Hatteras
crying. She dried her eyes, welcomed Walker, and said that she was
sorry, but her husband was away.

Walker started, looked at her eyes, and asked hesitatingly whether he
could help. Mrs. Hatteras replied with an ill-assumed surprise that
she did not understand. Walker suggested that there was trouble. Mrs.
Hatteras denied the truth of the suggestion. Walker pressed the point
and Mrs. Hatteras yielded so far as to assert that there was no
trouble in which Hatteras was concerned. Walker hardly thought it the
occasion for a parade of manners, and insisted on pointing out
that his knowledge of her husband was intimate and dated from his
schooldays. Thereupon Mrs. Hatteras gave way.

"Dick goes away alone," she said. "He stains his skin and goes away at
night. He tells me that he must, that it's the only way by which he
can know the natives, and that so it's a sort of duty. He says the
black tells nothing of himself to the white man--ever. You must go
amongst them if you are to know them. So he goes, and I never know
when he will come back. I never know whether he will come back."

"But he has done that sort of thing on and off for years, and he has
always come back," replied Walker.

"Yes, but one day he will not." Walker comforted her as well as he
could, praised Hatteras for his conduct, though his heart was hot
against him, spoke of risks that every one must run who serve the
Empire. "Never a lotus closes, you know," he said, and went back to
the factory with the consciousness that he had been telling lies.

It was no se