ient for all parties."

"So? All the more to his credit, then, that he moved heaven and earth
to bring it about. By Jove! I believe I'd have thought a long while
before going down there myself."

"Rather. But I can't help being deuced sorry for him."

If need hardly be said that Hoste had indeed put the whole case into a
nutshell as far as Eustace was concerned. Even then, lying there on the
brink of the cliff above-mentioned, and whither he had withdrawn on the
pretence of keeping a look out, but really in order to be alone, he was
indulging in the full bitterness of his feelings. All had come to an
end. The cup had been dashed from his lips. The blissful glow of more
than earthly happiness in which he had moved for the past few months,
had turned to blight and ruin and blackness, even as the cloudless
sunlight of the morning had disappeared into the leaden terrors of the
oncoming storm. Would that from it a bolt might fall which should
strike him dead!

Even in the full agony of his bitterness he could not wish that the
awful fate of his cousin had ever remained a mystery, could not regret
the part he had borne in rescuing him from that fate. It might be that
the minutes he himself had spent, helpless at the bottom of the noisome
pit, had brought home to his mind such a vivid realisation of its
horrors as those surveying it from the brink could never attain.
Anyway, while musing upon his own blighted life, his dream of love and
possession suddenly and cruelly quenched, he could not wish the poor
wretch back in such a living hell again.

Yet for what had he been rescued? Of what value was the life of a
raving, gibbering maniac to himself or the world in general? And this
was the thing to which Eanswyth was now bound. A warm, beautiful,
living body chained to a loathsome, festering corpse; and his had been
the hand which had forged the links, his the hand which had turned the
key in the padlock. He could not even lay to his soul the flattering
unction that the unfortunate man would eventually succumb to the after
results of his horrible sufferings. Lunatics, barring accidents, are
proverbially long-lived, and Tom Carhayes had the strength and
constitution of an elephant. He would be far more likely to injure
other people than himself.

Meanwhile, those left in camp were resting appreciatively after their
labours, and conversing.

"_Amakosi_," said Josane, with a queer smile. "Do you think you co