a laugh. "I have not brought the infection down to
Loango; you need not be afraid of that."

For a moment she looked as if she were going to explain that she was
not "afraid of that." Then she changed her mind and let it pass, as he
seemed to believe.

"Joseph constructed a disinfecting room with a wood-smoke fire, or
something of that description, and he has been disinfecting everything,
down to Oscard's pipes."

She gave a little laugh, which stopped suddenly.

"Was it very bad?" she asked.

"Oh, no. We took it in time, you see. We had eleven deaths. And now
we are all right. We are only waiting for Durnovo to join, and then we
shall make a start. Of course, somebody else could have come down for
the quinine."

"Yes."

He glanced at her beneath his lashes before going on,

"But, as Durnovo's nerves were a little shaken, it--was just as well,
don't you know, to get him out of it all."

"I suppose he got himself out of it all?" she said quietly.

"Well--to a certain extent. With our approval, you understand."

Men have an esprit de sexe as well as women. They like to hustle the
cowards through with the crowd, unobserved.

"It is a strange thing," said Jocelyn, with a woman's scorn of the man
who fears those things of which she herself has no sort of dread, "a
very strange thing, that Mr. Durnovo said nothing about it down here. It
is not known in Loango that you had small-pox in the camp."

"Well, you see, when he left we were not quite sure about it."

"I imagine Mr. Durnovo knows all about small-pox. We all do on this
coast. He could hardly help recognising it in its earliest stage."

She turned on him with a smile which he remembered afterwards. At the
moment he felt rather abashed, as if he had been caught in a very maze
of untruths. He did not meet her eyes. It was a matter of pride with
him that he was equal to any social emergency that might arise. He had
always deemed himself capable of withholding from the whole questioning
world anything that he might wish to withhold. But afterwards--later in
his life--he remembered that look in Jocelyn Gordon's face.

"Altogether," she said, with a peculiar little contented laugh, "I think
you cannot keep it up any longer. He ran away from you and left you to
fight against it alone. All the same, it was--nice--of you to try and
screen him. Very nice, but I do not think that I could have done it
myself. I suppose it was--noble--and women cannot be noble."