A fortnight later, as she sat in a deep chair in the living room, Hamoud presented himself in the doorway, to announce:

“He is here.”

Parr crept into her presence.

The little, grizzled fellow advanced a few steps, limping on his cane, then halted, frightened by this thin, white-faced woman who, her chin in her cupped hand, sat staring at him with the cold eyes of a queen about to condemn a malefactor to death. She was wrapped in a negligee of peach-colored silk from the flowing sleeves of which long tassels trailed on the rug. The morning light, as though lured from all other objects in the room by this motionless, fine figure, accentuated her appearance of iciness. She spoke, too, in the voice of a stranger, in accents that thrilled with a force produced incongruously from so emaciated a body.

“Come closer. I want to look at you.”

He resumed his tremulous advance very slowly, because he was so heavily burdened by his loyalty to the beloved master and his treason to this once gentle benefactress. Casting down his eyes, he stood before her abjectly leaning on his cane. His honest, deeply lined face twitched painfully; for he could feel her scorn passing over him like a winter blast. He faltered:

“I was helpless, ma’am. I only did as he ordered. He thought it best. He believed it wouldn’t leak out. We took all precautions.” He told her how Lawrence Teck had taken him from the Greenwich Village house to an obscure hotel, where they had found a strange gentleman, slender, with a fatigued, nervous face, almost too fastidiously dressed to be another traveler, smoking constantly, saying nothing. This gentleman’s name it was altogether a disjointed, feverish business anyway had never been pronounced in Parr’s hearing. The stranger had seemed at once a torment and a comfort to Mr. Teck. Occasionally, when Parr entered, it was as if he had interrupted a distressing scene. Mr. Teck had then jumped up with a queer smile, knocking against the chairs as he went to look out of the window. There the strange gentleman would join him, to put his hand on his shoulder, soothe him in a low voice. Then one morning Mr. Teck’s rooms were empty; and the hotel clerk handed Parr an envelope containing some banknotes and the scrawl, “Good-by. God bless you. Remember, keep quiet.”

“Here it is, ma’am.”

She snatched the note from him, pored over it fiercely, and thrust it into the bosom of her gown. Her lashes wearily veiled her implacable stare.

“You fool. You should have seen that he wasn’t in his senses. Where is he now?”

“He should be there,” Parr quavered. “By this time he might be inland.”

She saw a stream of men flowing in through the jungle, a human river doomed to roll at last over some tragic brink. She clenched her hands, seemed about to rise and rush out, as she was, in pursuit. She said:

“You are going with me.”

His jaw sagged. Gaping round him, taking the whole room as witness to this folly, he cried out, “Where to?” When she began to speak he sagged forward over his cane, drinking in the verification of her incredible desire. Her attitude did not change; her face remained cold; her lips hardly moved; but he was aware of a tremendous force behind the words, of something inflexible, invincible, grand perhaps of a flame without heat that filled her empty heart with an unearthly coruscation, like a radiance thrown back from the walls of a cavern of ice.

“Do you want to die, ma’am?”

“I?” Her voice expressed in that syllable such arrogance as youth feels at the thought of death; yet she did not look young she looked as old as eternity, and as passionless and overpowering.

He bowed his head beneath the pressure of this will, and the weight of his obligation. He perceived the uselessness of describing to her the dangers that she would run there, especially at the season that was beginning. Still, for a moment he pondered the trouble he would have in taking his broken body on that pilgrimage. “And this time it will get me: just one or two little chills,” he reflected, thinking of black-water fever. The thought came to him, however, that his life was no longer worth much, even to himself. This sitting with folded hands, a cane between one’s knees, in the tidy little house that she had given him and but for her it might have been the crutches!

Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded stars.