to walk, he worked himself into a fever again, and it was only when Royce warned him that he would kill himself if he kept on that he submitted to be carried, and forced himself to be patient.  And all the time the poor devil kept saying how unworthy he was of her, how miserably he had wasted his years, how unfitted he was for the great happiness which had come into his life.  I suppose every man says that when he is in love; very properly, too; but the worst of it was, in this man’s case, that it was so very true.  He was unworthy of her in everything but his love for her.  It used to frighten me to see how much he cared.  Well, we got out of it at last, and reached Alexandria, and saw white faces once more, and heard women’s voices, and the strain and fear of failure were over, and we could breathe again.  I was quite ready enough to push on to London, but we had to wait a week for the steamer, and during that time that man made my life miserable.  He had done so well, and would have done so much more if he had had my equipment, that I tried to see that he received all the credit due him.  But he would have none of the public receptions, and the audience with the khedive, or any of the fuss they made over us.  He only wanted to get back to her.  He spent the days on the quay watching them load the steamer, and counting the hours until she was to sail; and even at night he would leave the first bed he had slept in for six months, and would come into my room and ask me if I would not sit up and talk with him until daylight.  You see, after he had given up all thought of her, and believed himself about to die without seeing her again, it made her all the dearer, I suppose, and made him all the more fearful of losing her again.

“He became very quiet as soon as we were really under way, and Royce and I hardly knew him for the same man.  He would sit in silence in his steamer-chair for hours, looking out at the sea and smiling to himself, and sometimes, for he was still very weak and feverish, the tears would come to his eyes and run down his cheeks.  ’This is the way we would sit,’ he said to me one night, ’with the dark purple sky and the strange Southern stars over our heads, and the rail of the boat rising and sinking below the line of the horizon.  And I can hear her voice, and I try to imagine she is still sitting there, as she did the last night out, when I held her hands between mine.’” Gordon paused a moment, and then went on more slowly:  “I do not know whether it was that the excitement of the journey overland had kept him up or not, but as we went on he became much weaker and slept more, until Royce became anxious and alarmed about him.  But he did not know it himself; he had grown so sure of his recovery then that he did not understand what the weakness meant.  He fell off into long spells of sleep or unconsciousness, and woke only to be fed, and would then fall back to sleep again.  And in one of these spells of unconsciousness he died.  He died within two days of land.  He had no home and no country and no family, as I told you, and we buried him at sea.  He left nothing behind him, for the very clothes he wore were those we had given him—­nothing but the locket and the chain which he had told me to take from his neck when he died.”