apture
or death of the Umlimo--would it not be effectual to stop the rising?
and was he not in duty bound to further this end in the interests of his
fellow-countrymen? Conscience told him he might do this; for with all
the care and secrecy that had attended both his entrance to and exit
from the cave of mystery, he could not disguise from himself that, by
careful calculations as to time and locality, he might be able to find
the spot again. But then would rise before him his pledged word. He
had given it when in the power of this extraordinary being, when both
his own life and that of Nidia had lain in his hand, and he could not
now go back on it--no, not on any consideration. His countrymen must
take their chance. He had done all that could reasonably be expected of
him in resigning his position and its emoluments.

In doing this, however, it was pre-eminently a case of looking to virtue
as its own reward. Certainly it brought him no nearer the realisation
of his hopes; for so slender were his private means of existence, that
only by the exercise of the most rigid economy could he get along at
all, and the necessaries of life, be it remembered, were at famine
prices. Decidedly, indeed, his prospects were looking blacker and yet
more black.

And what of Nidia herself? As the days went by she seemed to draw no
nearer. Seldom now was he suffered to be alone with her, and then only
for a minute or so, when an ever-present feeling of _gene_ and flurry
would be there to mar the effect of any opportunity he might have had to
improve the occasion, and, indeed, he was beginning to regard matters as
hopeless. The persistent hostility of Mrs Bateman was ever on the
watch to defeat his every move; and as to this, even, there were times
when it seemed to him that Nidia was a trifle too acquiescent in the
latter's objectionable and scarcely concealed efforts at railing him
off. Then, too, Nidia was constantly surrounded by a knot of men, many
of them fine gallant-looking fellows, already distinguished for some
feat of intrepidity. There was the commander of the relief troop which
had brought her in, for instance, and Carbutt and Tarrant and several
others. He, John Ames, so far from being the one to bring her in, as he
used to pride himself would be the case, had merely imperilled her the
more by his own sheer incautious blundering. Sick at heart, he would
fain be lying where he had fallen--a battered, lifeless heap