only the dividends moved on and up.

Byng was not a great genius, and he had never given his natural
political talent its full chance; but his soul was bigger than his
pocket. He had a passionate love for the land--for England--which had
given him birth; and he had a decent pride in her honour and good name.
So it was that he had almost savagely challenged some of the sordid
deliberations of this stern conference. In a full-blooded and manly
appeal he begged them "to get on higher ground." If he could but have
heard it, it would have cheered the heart of the broken and discredited
pioneer of Empire at Capetown, who had received his death-warrant, to
take effect within five years, in the little cottage at Muizenberg by
the sea; as great a soul in posse as ever came from the womb of the
English mother; who said as he sat and watched the tide flow in and
out, and his own tide of life ebbed, "Life is a three days' trip to the
sea-shore: one day in going, one day in settling down, and one day in
packing up again."

Byng had one or two colleagues who, under his inspiration, also took
the larger view, and who looked ahead to the consequences yet to flow
from the fiasco at Doornkop, which became a tragedy. What would happen
to the conspirators of Johannesburg? What would happen to Jameson and
Willoughby and Bobby White and Raleigh Grey? Who was to go to South
Africa to help in holding things together, and to prevent the worst
happening, if possible? At this point they had arrived when they saw--

... The dull dank morn stare in,
Like a dim drowned face with oozy eyes.

A more miserable morning seldom had broken, even in England.

"I will go. I must go," remarked Byng at last, though there was a
strange sinking of the heart as he said it. Even yet the perfume of
Jasmine's cloak stole to his senses to intoxicate them. But it was his
duty to offer to go; and he felt that he could do good by going, and
that he was needed at Johannesburg. He, more than all of them, had been
in open conflict with Oom Paul in the the past, had fought him the most
vigorously, and yet for him the old veldschoen Boer had some regard and
much respect, in so far as he could respect a Rooinek at all.

"I will go," Byng repeated, and looked round the table at haggard
faces, at ashen faces, at the faces of men who had smoked to quiet
their nerves, or drunk hard all night to keep up their courage. How
many times they had done the same in olden da