“And I am sure he loves you.  Why not go to him and tell him your trouble?”

“He knows it already, Mr. Quatermain, and hates this marriage even more than I do, if that is possible.  But he is driven to it, as I am.  Oh!  I must tell the truth.  The doctor has some hold over him.  My father has done something dreadful; I don’t know what and I don’t want to know, but if it came out it would ruin my father, or worse, worse.  I am the price of his silence.  On the day of our marriage he will destroy the proofs.  If I refuse to marry him, they will be produced and then—­”

“It is difficult,” I said.

“It is more than difficult, it is terrible.  If you could see all there is in my heart, you would know how terrible.”

“I think I can see, Miss Heda.  Don’t say any more now.  Give me time to consider.  In case of necessity come to me again, and be sure that I will protect you.”

“But you are going in a week.”

“Many things happen in a week.  Sufficient to the day is its evil.  At the end of the week we will come to some decision unless everything is already decided.”

For the next twenty-four hours I reflected on this pretty problem as hard as ever I did on anything in all my life.  Here was a young woman who must somehow be protected from a scoundrel, but who could not be protected because she herself had to protect another scoundrel—­to wit, her own father.  Could the thing be faced out?  Impossible, for I was sure that Marnham had committed a murder, or murders, of which Rodd possessed evidence that would hang him.  Could Heda be married to Anscombe at once?  Yes, if both were willing, but then Marnham would still be hung.  Could they elope?  Possibly, but with the same result.  Could I take her away and put her under the protection of the Court at Pretoria?  Yes, but with the same result.  I wondered what my Hottentot retainer, Hans, would have advised, he who was named Light-in-Darkness, and in his own savage way was the cleverest and most cunning man that I have met.  Alas!  I could not raise him from the grave to tell me, and yet I knew well what he would have answered.

“Baas,” he would have said, “this is a rope which only the pale old man (i.e., death) can cut.  Let this doctor die or let the father die, and the maiden will be free.  Surely heaven is longing for one or both of them, and if necessary, Baas, I believe that I can point out a path to heaven!”

I laughed to myself at the thought, which was one that a white man could not entertain even as a thought.  And I felt that the hypothetical Hans was right, death alone could cut this knot, and the reflection made me shiver.

That night I slept uneasily and dreamed.  I dreamed that once more I was in the Black Kloof in Zululand, seated in front of the huts at the end of the kloof.  Before me squatted the old wizard, Zikali, wrapped up in his kaross—­Zikali, the “Thing-that-should-never-have-been-born,” whom I had not seen for years.  Near him were the ashes of a fire, by the help of which I knew he had been practising divination.  He looked up and laughed one of his terrible laughs.