nd what experiences
should have been ours between then and now?

"Do you know," she went on gravely, after a thoughtful pause, "at times
I think I must be frightfully hard-hearted and unfeeling--I mean, to
have looked upon what I did--" and she shuddered.

"I liked the Hollingworths so much, too. And yet somehow it all seems
to have happened so long ago. Why is it that I do not feel it more,
think of it more? Tell me your opinion."

"One word explains it," he answered. "That is, `Action'."

"Action?"

"Yes. You have been kept continually on the move ever since. First of
all, you had your own safety to secure; consequently you had no time to
think of anything but that--of anybody but yourself."

"That sounds horribly selfish, somehow, but true."

"Well, selfishness in its etymological sense is only another word for
self-preservation, or, at any rate, an extension of that principle.
Were you to sit down and weep over the loss of your friends until some
obliging barbarian should come up and put an end to you? I think the
pluck you showed throughout was wonderful, and not less so the soundness
of judgment. When you found poor Hollingworth's youngster so badly
hurt, didn't you sit there and look after him at momentary risk of your
life until he died, poor little chap? Selfish? I call it by another
name, and so will other people when we get safely out of this."

Nidia smiled, rather sadly, and shook her head.

"Leave _you_ alone for trying to flatter me," she said softly. "You
have been doing nothing else ever since we have been together. But--you
don't really think me unfeeling and hard-hearted, Mr Ames?"

He turned quickly, for he had been looking out over the surrounding
waste.

"That isn't what you called me the first time in Shiminya's kraal," he
said.

"What? Unfeeling and hard-hearted. No. Why should I?" she rejoined
demurely, but brimming with mischief. Then, as he looked hurt, "Don't
be angry. I'm only teasing, as usual. Really, though, I ought to
apologise for that slip. But the name came out without my knowing it.
You see, Susie and I used always to call you by it between ourselves.
We saw it in the book at Cogill's the day we arrived, written in a hand
that seemed somehow to stand out differently from among all the others.
At first, when we were trying to locate the people there, we used to
wonder which was `John Ames,' and so we got into the habit of calling
you that way by ourse