in it!"

"Who will believe it?" Da Souza asked, with a sneer. "They will say that
it is but one more of the fairy tales of this wonderful Mr. Scarlett
Trent."

The breath came through Trent's lips with a little hiss and his eyes
were flashing with a dull fire. But Da Souza held his ground. He had
nerved himself up to this and he meant going through with it.

"You think I dare not breathe a word for my own sake," he continued.
"There is reason in that, but I have other monies. I am rich enough
without my sixth share of that Bekwando Land and Mining Company which
you and the Syndicate are going to bring out! But then, I am not a fool!
I have no wish to throw away money. Now I propose to you therefore a
friendly settlement. My daughter Julie is very charming. You admire her,
I am sure. You shall marry her, and then we will all be one family. Our
interests will be the same, and you may be sure that I shall look after
them. Come! Is that not a friendly offer?"

For several minutes Trent smoked furiously, but he did not speak. At the
end of that time he took the revolver once more from the drawer of his
writing-table and fingered it.

"Da Souza," he said, "if I had you just for five minutes at Bekwando we
would talk together of black-mail, you and I, we would talk of marrying
your daughter. We would talk then to some purpose--you hound! Get out of
the room as fast as your legs will carry you. This revolver is loaded,
and I'm not quite master of myself."

Da Souza made off with amazing celerity. Trent drew a short, quick
breath. There was a great deal of the wild beast left in him still. At
that moment the desire to kill was hot in his blood. His eyes glared as
he walked up and down the room. The years of civilisation seemed to have
become as nothing. The veneer of the City speculator had fallen away.
He was once more as he had been in those wilder days when men made
their own laws, and a man's hold upon life was a slighter thing than
his thirst for gold. As such, he found the atmosphere of the little room
choking him, he drew open the French windows of his little study and
strode out into the perfumed and sunlit morning. As such, he found
himself face to face unexpectedly and without warning with the girl whom
he had discovered sketching in the shrubbery the day before.

CHAPTER XV

Probably nothing else in the world could so soon have transformed
Scarlett Trent from the Gold Coast buccaneer to the law-abiding