ey should not do so, this may be found when they come, and will be
given to my dear wife at Cairo, if she is still there. Her name is Mrs.
Hilliard, and her address will surely be known, at the Bank."

"These are the papers I was looking for," he said to Zaki. "I will tell
you about them, afterwards."

He handed ten dollars to the native, thrust the packet into his breast
pocket, and walked slowly down to the river. He had never entertained
any hope of finding his father, but this evidence of his death gave him
a shock.

His mother was right, then. She had always insisted there was a
possibility that he might have escaped the massacre at El Obeid. He had
done so. He had reached Khartoum. He had started, full of hope of
seeing his wife and child, but had been treacherously massacred, here.

He would not, now, read this message from the grave. That must be
reserved for some time when he was alone. He knew enough to be able to
guess the details--they could not be otherwise than painful. He felt
almost glad that his mother was not alive. To him, the loss was
scarcely a real one. His father had left him, when an infant. Although
his mother had so often spoken of him, he had scarcely been a reality
to Gregory; for when he became old enough to comprehend the matter, it
seemed to him certain that his father must have been killed. He could,
then, hardly understand how his mother could cling to hope.

His father had been more a real character to him, since he started from
Cairo, than ever before. He knew the desert, now, and its fierce
inhabitants. He could picture the battle and since the fight at
Omdurman he had been able to see, before him, the wild rush on the
Egyptian square, the mad confusion, the charge of a handful of white
officers, and the one white man going off, with the black battalion
that held together.

If, then, it was a shock to him to know how his father had died, how
vastly greater would it have been, to his mother! She had pictured him
as dying suddenly, fighting to the last, and scarce conscious of pain
till he received a fatal wound. She had said, to Gregory, that it was
better to think of his father as having died thus, than lingering in
hopeless slavery, like Neufeld; but it would have been agony to her to
know that he did suffer for two years, that he had then struggled on
through all dangers to Khartoum, and was on his way back, full of hope
and love for her, when he was treacherously murdered.