afalgar Club, and had forgotten to post. When he had put the letter
inside the envelope and stamped it, he saw that the envelope was one
carrying the mark of the Club. By accident he had brought it with the
letters written there. He hesitated a moment, then refrained from
opening the letter again, and presently went out into the night and
posted all his letters.

CHAPTER XIX

TO-MORROW ... PREPARE!

Krool did not sleep. What he read in a letter he had found in a
hallway, what he knew of those dark events in South Africa, now to
culminate in a bitter war, and what, with the mysterious psychic
instinct of race, he divined darkly and powerfully, all kept his eyes
unsleeping and his mind disordered. More than any one, he knew of the
inner story of the Baas' vrouw during the past week and years; also he
had knowledge of what was soon to empty out upon the groaning earth the
entrails of South Africa; but how he knew was not to be discovered.
Even Rudyard, who thought he read him like a book, only lived on the
outer boundaries of his character. Their alliance was only the durable
alliance of those who have seen Death at their door, and together have
driven him back.

Barry Whalen had regarded Krool as a spy; all Britishers who came and
went in the path to Rudyard's door had their doubts or their dislike of
him; and to every servant of the household he was a dark and isolated
figure. He never interfered with the acts of his fellow-servants,
except in so far as those acts affected his master's comfort; and he
paid no attention to their words except where they affected himself.

"When you think it's a ghost, it's only Krool wanderin' w'ere he ain't
got no business," was the angry remark of the upper-housemaid, whom his
sudden appearance had startled in a dim passage one day.

"Lor'! what a turn you give me, Mr. Krool, spookin' about where there's
no call for you to be," she had said to him, and below stairs she had
enlarged upon his enormities greatly.

"And Mrs. Byng, she not like him better as we do," was the comment of
Lablanche, the lady's maid. "A snake in the grass--that is what Madame
think."

Slowly the night passed for Krool. His disturbed brain was like some
dark wood through which flew songless birds with wings of night;
through which sped the furtive dwellers of the grass and the
earth-covert. The real and the imaginative crowded the dark purlieus.
He was the victim of his blood, his beginnings off t