this army
of destroyers, could not but admit a qualm of very real and
soul-stirring misgiving. That he had good grounds for the same we shall
see anon.

CHAPTER FOUR.

HERMIA.

"I don't care. I'll say it again. It's a beastly shame him leaving you
alone like this."

"But you are not to say it again, or to say it at all. Remember of whom
you are speaking."

"Oh, no fear of my forgetting that--of being able to forget it. All the
same, he ought to be ashamed of himself."

And the speaker tapped his foot impatiently upon the virgin soil of
Mashunaland, looking very hot, and very tall, and very handsome. The
remonstrant, however, received the repetition of the offence in silence,
but for a half inaudible sigh, which might or might not have been meant
to convey that she was not nearly so angry with the other as her words
seemed to imply or their occasion to demand. Then there was silence.

An oblong house, of the type known as "wattle and daub," with
high-pitched thatch roof, partitioned within so as to form three rooms--
a house rough and ready in construction and aspect, but far more
comfortable than appearances seemed to warrant. Half a dozen circular
huts with conical roofs, clustered around, serving the purpose of
kitchen and storehouse and quarters for native servants; beyond these,
again, a smaller oblong structure, constituting a stable, the whole
walled round by a stockade of mopani poles;--and there you have a far
more imposing establishment than that usually affected by the pioneer
settler. Around, the country is undulating and open, save for a not
very thick growth of mimosa; but on one hand a series of great granite
kopjes rise abruptly from the plain, the gigantic boulders piled one
upon the other in the fantastic and arbitrary fashion which forms such a
characteristic feature in the landscape of a large portion of Rhodesia.

"Well?"

The woman was the first to break the silence--equally a characteristic
feature, a cynic might declare.

"Well?"

The answer was staccato, and not a little pettish. The first speaker
smiled softly to herself. She revelled in her power, and was positively
enjoying the cat and mouse game, though it might have been thought that
long custom would have rendered even that insidious pastime stale and
insipid.

"So sorry you have to go," she murmured sweetly. "But it's getting
late, and you'll hardly reach home before dark."

The start--the blank look whic