she removed it, and the beautiful hair
underneath, falling into confusion, must be put in its place by skilled
instinctive fingers, every movement answering to a similar
self-restraining effort in the mind within. She dried her tears; she
drew closer the black scarf round the shoulders of her white dress; she
straightened the violets at her belt--Muriel's mid-day gift--till he
beheld her, white and suffering indeed, but lovely and composed--queen
of herself.

She made him talk of his adventures, and he obeyed her, partly to help
her in the struggle he perceived, partly because in the
position--beneath and beyond all hope--to which she had reduced him, it
was the only way by which he could save anything out of the wreck. And
she bravely responded. She could and did lend him enough of her mind to
make it worth his while. A friend should not come home to her from
perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful--a niggard of sympathy
and praise.

So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with
them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little
of what had--what must have--occurred. Diana, carved in white wax, but
for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was
listening to a description of an English embassy sent through the length
and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria. The
embassy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated
the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids. The road it marched
by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves--had been so strewn probably
for thousands of years. "One night my horse trod unawares on two
skeletons--women--locked in each other's arms," said Hugh; "scores of
others round them. In the evening we camped at a village where every
able-bodied male had been killed the year before."

"Shot?" asked the doctor.

"Oh, dear, no! That would have been to waste ammunition. A limb was
hacked off, and they bled to death."

His mother was looking at the speaker with all her eyes, but she did not
hear a word he said. Was he pale or not?

Diana shuddered.

"And that is _stopped_--forever?" Her eyes were on the speaker.

"As long as our flag flies there," said the soldier, simply.

Her look kindled. For a moment she was the shadow, the beautiful shadow,
of her old Imperialist self--the proud, disinterested lover of
her country.

The doctor shook his head.

"Don't forget the gin, and