iberty. Horror
of child-bearing and a passion for the care and cultivation of her own
beauty were further reasons for not succumbing to the temptation to
take another man slave in marriage. She had contented herself with
holding the hearts of the men who loved her in her hands and squeezing
them dry of every drop of devotion and self-sacrifice they could
generate.

But the harvest of hearts was giving out, and the wolf was at the door.
She had had very bad luck in the last year or two. The hearts that had
come her way were as selfish as her own, and knew how to slip elusively
from greedy little hands, without yielding too much. For a long time
it had seemed to her that the world had become bankrupt of big,
generous-giving hearts, and that there were no more little games of
life worth playing. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she happened upon
Wankelo, a green spot in the desert. Here were girls to act as
counters in the game she loved to play, and here, too, unless she were
grievously mistaken, was a man who had the best of sport to offer.
With the hunter's sure instinct for the prey, she recognized unerringly
the big, generous qualities of Druro's nature. Here was a heart that
could be made to suffer and to give. Besides, he was extremely
good-looking. She felt a kind of hopeful certainty that he could offer
her jaded heart something new in the way of emotions.

In consideration of these things, she decided to pitch her tent for a
while in Wankelo. Selukine could wait. Her projected visit there was,
in any case, only one of speculation and curiosity. She had heard of
the place as being thick with small gold mines closed down for want of
capital, and it had occurred to her that the possibility of finding a
gold mine cheaply, and a capitalist for nothing at all, was quite on
the cards. Besides, discreet inquiry, or, rather, discreet listening
to the frank discussion of other people's affairs, which is one of the
features of Rhodesian life, had elicited the happy information that
Druro was on the way to becoming a very wealthy man. The Leopard reef,
report said, was making bigger and richer at every blast, and the
expectation was that it would be the richest thing in the way of mines
that Rhodesia had yet known. Luck, like nature, has her darlings.

The Leopard mine was Druro's own property and the darling of his heart,
next to his dog Toby. He had taken forty thousand pounds sterling from
it in one year