Gordon raised his eyes slowly from the observation of his finger-tips as they rested on the edge of the table before him to those of the American girl who sat opposite.  She had heard his story so far without any show of attention, and had been watching, rather with a touch of fondness in her eyes, the clever, earnest face of Arbuthnot, who was following Gordon’s story with polite interest.  But now, at Gordon’s last words, she turned her eyes to him with a look of awful indignation, which was followed, when she met his calmly polite look of inquiry, by one of fear and almost of entreaty.

“When the man came to,” continued Gordon, in the same conventional monotone, “he begged me to take the chain and locket to a girl whom he said I would find either in London or in New York.  He gave me the address of her banker.  He said:  ’Take it off my neck before you bury me; tell her I wore it ever since she gave it to me.  That it has been a charm and loadstone to me.  That when the locket rose and fell against my breast, it was as if her heart were pressing against mine and answering the beating and throbbing of the blood in my veins.’”

Gordon paused, and returned to the thoughtful scrutiny of his finger-tips.

“The man did not die,” he said, raising his head.  “Royce brought him back into such form again that in about a week we were able to take him along with us on a litter.  But he was very weak, and would lie for hours sleeping when we rested, or mumbling and raving in a fever.  We learned from him at odd times that he had been trying to reach Lake Tchad, to do what we had done, without any means of doing it.  He had had not more than a couple of dozen porters and a corporal’s guard of Senegalese soldiers.  He was the only white man in the party, and his men had turned on him, and left him as we found him, carrying off with them his stock of provisions and arms.  He had undertaken the expedition on a promise from the French government to make him governor of the territory he opened up if he succeeded, but he had had no official help.  If he failed, he got nothing; if he succeeded, he did so at his own expense and by his own endeavors.  It was only a wonder he had been able to get as far as he did.  He did not seem to feel the failure of his expedition.  All that was lost in the happiness of getting back alive to this woman with whom he was in love.  He had been three days alone before we found him, and in those three days, while he waited for death, he had thought of nothing but that he would never see her again.  He had resigned himself to this, had given up all hope, and our coming seemed like a miracle to him.  I have read about men in love, I have seen it on the stage, I have seen it in real life, but I never saw a man so grateful to God and so happy and so insane over a woman as this man was.  He raved about her when he was feverish, and he talked and talked to me about her when he was in his senses.  The porters could not understand