he began to corroborate it with particulars which he would otherwise have spared his auditor, but with the same impersonal accent.  He told Clarice of the condition of the village after Gorley’s raid, as he first came within view of it:  here the body of a negro stood pinned upright against the wall of his hut by an assegai fixing his neck; there another was lying charred upon still-smouldering embers; and as he saw her turn pale and shudder he almost wondered why.

But in spite of his efforts to appreciate its actuality the incident grew more unsubstantial the further he progressed in its narration, and he ended it abruptly.

‘Gorley was properly tried,’ he said—­’his relations testified to the justice of his trial—­and he was executed in accordance with the verdict.’

Clarice sat motionless after he had ended.  Drake watched the flames sparkle in her gray eyes.  At his elbow the clock ticked upon the mantelshelf spacing the seconds, and the fire was hot upon his limbs.  That dream-world in Africa dissolved to a vapour.

Clarice recalled him to it at last.

‘I never imagined,’ she said in a low voice, ’that the truth was anything like this.  I shouldn’t have asked you if I had.  A long time ago I knew that something was being concealed, but I thought it was an accident or—­well, I couldn’t conceive what it was and I grew curious, I suppose.  When you came back to England I thought you might be able to tell me.  Lately, however, I began to fancy that you were concerned in it some way.  You might have sent Mr. ——­’ she checked herself with the name unspoken and went on, ’you might have sent him on some fatal mission or something of that sort.  But this!  Oh, why did you tell me?’

She took her hands from beneath her chin and clenched them with a convulsive movement upon her knees.  Her memory had gone back to the days when she and Gorley had been engaged, to their meetings, their intimate conversations.  This man, in whose hand her hands had lain, whose lips had pressed hers, been pressed by hers, this man had been convicted of a double crime—­dastardly murder and dastardly theft—­and punished for it!  Her pride cried out against her knowledge, and cried out against the man who had vouchsafed the knowledge.

‘Why did you tell me?’ she repeated, and the words were an accusation.

‘You wished to know,’ he replied doggedly, ’and it seemed to me that you had the right to know.’

‘Right!’ she exclaimed, ’right!  What right had I to know?  What right had you to tell me?’

She rose to her feet suddenly as she spoke and confronted Drake.  He looked into her eyes steadily, but with a certain perplexity.

‘I felt bound to tell you,’ he said simply, and his simplicity appealed to her by its frank recognition of an obligation to her.

‘Why,’ she asked herself, ’why did he feel bound?  Merely because I wished to know the truth of the matter, or because he himself was implicated in it as the instrument of Gorley’s punishment?’ Either reason was sufficient to appease her.  She inclined to the latter; there were conclusions to be inferred from it which staunched her wounded pride.