But the man, the man who had gripped death by the throat and had torn the feathers from his grisly, fleshless fingers,—­her imagination was very vivid at night, especially after reading a thrilling chapter of Hebrew massacre,—­that man had talked with her upon such trifles as books and plays, strange pageants enacted among paper and canvas unrealities of life.  She had actually been leaning against some of these painted scenes while the man who had fought his way into the depths of that forest which no white man but himself had yet penetrated,—­the man whose life had, day by day and night by night, been dependent upon the accuracy of his rifle aim,—­had talked with her.

That was really the sum of all her thoughts.  She did not try to recall the words that he had spoken; it was simply the figure of the man who had been before her that now remained on her mind.  She did not stop to think whether or not he had spoken as a man with intellect would speak; whether he had spoken as a man whose orthodoxy was beyond suspicion would speak.  The question of his orthodoxy, of his intellect (which may be just the opposite), did not occur to her.  All she felt was that she had been talking face to face with a man.

So that the result of her evening’s entertainment, after she had read her inspiring chapter in the Bible and said her bedside prayer, she might have defined in precisely the same words as she had spoken to her friend Ella when Ella had asked her, immediately on entering the carriage, what she thought of Herbert Courtland.

“He is the bravest man in the world at present.”

She did not fall asleep for a considerable time.

CHAPTER XI.

I’M AFRAID THAT I MUST HAVE PRINCIPLE ON MY SIDE.

“It is quite ridiculous, besides being untrue,” said Phyllis, when she had read the article in the newspaper to which her father called her attention one morning, a week after the criticism on “Cagliostro” had appeared.  The article was headed: 

“DYNAMITE VERSUS EVANGELIZATION,”

and it came out in a weekly paper devoted to the interests of Nonconformists.

“It is with the deepest regret that we have to call the attention of our readers and the public [the article ran] to the series of charges brought by the Revs.  Joseph Capper and Evans Jones, the eminent pioneers of the Nonconformist Eastern Mission, against a gentleman to whom a considerable amount of honor is just now being given by the Royal Geographical Society, the Ethnological Institute, the Ornithological Association, and other secular organizations, on account of his exploration in the Island of New Guinea.  It is scarcely necessary to say that we allude to Mr. Herbert Courtland.  The position which has been occupied for several years by the two distinguished ministers whose self sacrifice in endeavoring to spread the Light through the dark places of the tropical