Phillips looked at the young man keenly and smiled.  “Especially love stories,” he said.

Gordon looked back at him as if he did not understand.

“Tell it, Gordon,” said Mr. Trevelyan.

“Yes,” said Gordon, nodding his head in assent, “I was thinking of a particular story.  It is as complete, I think, and as dramatic as any of those we read.  It is about a man I met in Africa.  It is not a long story,” he said, looking around the table tentatively, “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.”