hat led back to the tavern on the veld and the grave by
the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough had thought, those jewels
and securities and the one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an
honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He
breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, and
the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin shone like
copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six
seventeen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that when
you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No,
Gueldersdorp was not a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch! That
chattering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use
them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought in
the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.

Then the girl!... He grinned in his bushy beard, thinking how thundering
scared she would look if she encountered him by chance, and recognised
him. The beard would not hide him from her eyes. No, no! And he smelled at
the little tan glove, that had a slight, clean, delicate perfume about
it, and thrust it into his breeches-pocket, and crossed the river again,
making his way back to the native town by devious native paths that snaked
and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he himself made his
tortuous progress through the world.

He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of spending a lonely
night without the solace of liquor or woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in
Gueldersdorp just now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the
price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond Town
to seem flush of dollars.

Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with the tobacco he still
had left, and the big lump of opium he carried in a tin box in a pocket of
the heavy money-belt he wore under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped
for the tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown
lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed, and
the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that had the
purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with iodide of
potassium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points,
and his thick hands ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been; and
he had learned the opium-habit from a woman who had