him leave Africa at once; now he almost wished he had bid him
stay. There was a weary, unsatisfied longing for some touch of love
or of gratitude from this usurper, whom he had raised in his place. He
would have been rewarded enough if one sign of gladness that he lived
had broken through the egotism and the stricken fear of the man whom he
remembered as a little golden-headed child, with the hand of their dying
mother lying in benediction on the fair, silken curls.

He had asked no questions. He had gone back to no recriminations. He
guessed all it needed him to know; and he recoiled from the recital of
the existence whose happiness was purchased by his own misery, and whose
dignity was built on sand. His sacrifice had not been in vain. Placed
out of the reach of temptation, the plastic, feminine, unstable
character had been without a stain in the sight of men. But it was
little better at the core; and he wondered, in his suffering, as he went
onward through the beauty of the young day, whether it had been worth
the bitter price he had paid to raise this bending reed from out the
waters which would have broken and swamped it at the outset. It grew
fair, and free, and flower-crowned now, in the midst of a tranquil and
sunlit lake; but was it of more value than a drifted weed bearing the
snake-egg hidden at its root?

He had come so far out of the ordinary route across the plains that
it was two hours or more before he saw the dark, gray square of the
caravanserai walls, and to its left that single, leaning pine growing
out of a cleft within the rock that overhung the spot where the keenest
anguish of all his life had known had been encountered and endured--the
spot which yet, for sake of the one laid to rest there beneath the
somber branches, would be forever dearer to him than any other place in
the soil of Africa.

While yet the caravanserai was distant, the piteous cries of a
mother-goat caught his ear. She was bleating beside a water-course, into
which her kid of that spring had fallen, and whose rapid swell, filled
by the recent storm, was too strong for the young creature. Absorbed
as he was in his own thoughts, the cry reached him and drew him to the
spot. It was not in him willingly to let any living thing suffer, and
he was always gentle to all animals. He stooped, and, with some little
difficulty, rescued the little goat for its delighted dam.

As he bent over the water he saw something glitter beneath it.