in a highly respectable exhibition),
my mother at once began to pack up her properties and make ready to
accompany us.

Never was there a more good-humoured _chaperon_. If one of us entered
the room where she was sitting with the other, she would humorously give
me a push, and observing 'Two is company, young people, three is
none,' would toddle off with all the alacrity that her figure and age
permitted.

I learned from inquiries addressed to the _Family Herald_
(correspondence column) that the Soudan was then, even as it is now, the
land safest against English law. Spain, in this respect, was reckoned a
bad second.

The very next day I again broached the subject of foreign travel to my
mother. It was already obvious that the frost would not last for ever.
Once the snow melted, once the crushed mass that had been a baronet was
discovered, circumstantial evidence would point to Philippa. True, there
was no one save myself who could positively _swear_ that Philippa
had killed Sir Runan. Again, though I could positively swear it,
my knowledge was only an inference of my own. Philippa herself had
completely forgotten the circumstance. But the suspicions of the Bearded
Woman and of the White Groom were sure to be aroused, and the Soudan I
resolved to seek without an hour's delay.

I reckoned without my hostess.

My mother at first demurred.

'You certainly don't look well, Basil. But why the Soudan?'

'A whim, a sick man's fancy. Perhaps because it is not so very remote
from Old Calabar, the country of Philippa's own father. Mother, tell me,
how do you like her?'

'She is the woman you love, and however shady her antecedents, however
peculiar her style of conversation, she is, she must be, blameless.
To say more, after so short an acquaintance, might savour of haste and
exaggeration.'

A woman's logic!

'Then you _will_ come to the Soudan with us to-morrow?'

'No, my child, further south than Spain I will _not_ go, not this
journey!'

Here Philippa entered.

'Well, what's the next news, old man?' she said.

'To Spain, to-morrow!'

'Rain, rain, Go to Spain,
Be sure you don't come back again.'

sang sweet Philippa, in childish high spirits.

I had rarely seen her thus!

Alas, Philippa's nursery charm against the rain proved worse than
unavailing.

That afternoon, after several months of brave black frost, which had
gripped the land in its stern clasp, the rain began to fall heavily.

Th