of it. While you were dressing yourself, I have been talking to
the officer who was in command of your boat. He was a brave man, Benita,
and I am sorry to tell you he is gone."

She grasped a stanchion and clung there, staring at him with a wild,
white face.

"How do you know that, Father?"

Mr. Clifford drew a copy of the _Natal Mercury_ of the previous day from
the pocket of his ulster, and while she waited in an agony he hunted
through the long columns descriptive of the loss of the _Zanzibar_.
Presently he came to the paragraph he sought, and read it aloud to her.
It ran:

"The searchers on the coast opposite the scene of the shipwreck report
that they met a Kaffir who was travelling along the seashore, who
produced a gold watch which he said he had taken from the body of a
white man that he found lying on the sand at the mouth of the Umvoli
River. Inside the watch is engraved, 'To Seymour Robert Seymour, from
his uncle, on his twenty-first birthday.' The name of Mr. Seymour
appears as a first-class passenger to Durban by the _Zanzibar_. He was
a member of an old English family in Lincolnshire. This was his second
journey to South Africa, which he visited some years ago with his
brother on a big-game shooting expedition. All who knew him then will
join with us in deploring his loss. Mr. Seymour was a noted shot and
an English gentleman of the best stamp. He was last seen by one of the
survivors of the catastrophe, carrying Miss Clifford, the daughter of
the well-known Natal pioneer of that name, into a boat, but as this
young lady is reported to have been saved, and as he entered the boat
with her, no explanation is yet forthcoming as to how he came to his sad
end."

"I fear that is clear enough," said Mr. Clifford, as he folded up his
paper.

"Yes, clear enough," she repeated in a strained voice. "And
yet--yet--oh! Father, he had just asked me to marry him, and I can't
believe that he is dead before I had time to answer."

"Good Heavens!" said the old man, "they never told me that. It is
dreadfully sad. God help you, my poor child! There is nothing more to
say except that he was only one among three hundred who have gone with
him. Be brave now, before all these people. Look--here comes the tug."

The following week was very much of a blank to Benita. When they reached
shore some old friends of her father's took her and him to their house,
a quiet place upon the Berea. Here, now that the first excitement