y, "but it ends
badly."

There was a silence much more appreciated than a polite murmur of
invitation would have been, and the simply smart people settled
themselves rigidly to catch every word for future use. They realized
that this would be a story which had not as yet appeared in the
newspapers, and which would not make a part of Gordon's book. Mrs.
Trevelyan smiled encouragingly upon her former protege; she was sure
he was going to do himself credit; but the American girl chose this
chance, when all the other eyes were turned expectantly towards the
explorer, to look at her lover.

"We were on our return march from Lake Tchad to the Mobangi," said
Gordon. "We had been travelling over a month, sometimes by water and
sometimes through the forest, and we did not expect to see any other
white men besides those of our own party for several months to come.
In the middle of a jungle late one afternoon I found this man lying at
the foot of a tree. He had been cut and beaten and left for dead. It
was as much of a surprise to me, you understand, as it would be to you
if you were driving through Trafalgar Square in a hansom, and an
African lion should spring up on your horses' haunches. We believed we
were the only white men that had ever succeeded in getting that far
south. Crampel had tried it, and no one knows yet whether he is dead
or alive; Doctor Schlemen had been eaten by cannibals, and Major
Bethume had turned back two hundred miles farther north; and we could
no more account for this man's presence than if he had been dropped
from the clouds. Lieutenant Royce, my surgeon, went to work at him,
and we halted where we were for the night. In about an hour the man
moved and opened his eyes. He looked up at us and said, 'Thank
God!'--because we were white, I suppose--and went off into
unconsciousness again. When he came to the next time, he asked Royce,
in a whisper, how long he had to live. He wasn't the sort of a man you
had to lie to about a thing like that, and Royce told him he did not
think he could live for more than an hour or two. The man moved his
head to show that he understood, and raised his hand to his throat and
began pulling at his shirt, but the effort sent him off into a
fainting-fit again. I opened his collar for him as gently as I could,
and found that his fingers had clinched around a silver necklace that
he wore about his neck, and from which there hung a gold locket shaped
like a heart."

Gordon