ngo. There
are some men who deteriorate in the wilds, while others are better,
stronger, finer creatures away from the luxury of civilisation and
the softening influence of female society. Of these latter was Victor
Durnovo.

Of one thing Guy Oscard soon became aware, namely, that no one could
make the men work as could Durnovo. He had merely to walk to the door of
his tent to make every picker on the little Plateau bend over his tree
with renewed attention. And while above all was eagerness and hurry,
below, in the valley, this man's name insured peace.

The trees were now beginning to show the good result of pruning and a
regular irrigation. Never had the leaves been so vigorous, never had the
Simiacine trees borne such a bushy, luxuriant growth since the dim dark
days of the Flood.

Oscard relapsed into his old hunting ways. Day after day he tranquilly
shouldered his rifle, and alone, or followed by one attendant only, he
disappeared into the forest, only to emerge therefrom at sunset. What he
saw there he never spoke of. Sure it was that he must have seen strange
things, for no prying white man had set foot in these wilds before
him; no book has ever been written of that country that lies around the
Simiacine Plateau.

He was not the man to worry himself over uncertainties. He had an
enormous faith in the natural toughness of an Englishman, and while he
crawled breathlessly in the track of the forest monsters he hardly gave
a thought to Jack Meredith. Meredith, he argued to himself, had always
risen to the occasion: why should he not rise to this? He was not the
sort of man to die from want of staying power, which, after all, is
the cause of more deaths than we dream of. And when he had recovered he
would either return or send back Joseph with a letter containing those
suggestions of his which were really orders.

Of Millicent Chyne he thought more often, with a certain tranquil sense
of a good time to come. In her also he placed a perfect faith. A poet
has found out that, if one places faith in a man, it is probable that
the man will rise to trustworthiness--of woman he says nothing. But of
these things Guy Oscard knew little. He went his own tranquilly strong
way, content to buy his own experience.

He was thinking of Millicent Chyne one misty morning while he walked
slowly backwards and forwards before his tent. His knowledge of the
country told him that the mist was nothing but the night's accumulation
o