“Only on one road.  Mr. Dale, he was well armed, with rifle and revolver; and I cautioned him not to show a diamond on the road.  Who would molest him?  Diamonds don’t show, like gold.  Who was to know he had three thousand pounds hidden under his armpits, and in two barrels of his revolver?”

“Three thousand pounds!” cried Dale.  “You trusted him with three thousand pounds?”

“Certainly.  They were worth about three thousand pounds in Cape Town, and half as much again in”—­

Phoebe started up in a moment.  “Thank God!” she cried.  “There’s hope for me.  Oh, Dick, he is not dead:  He has only deserted me.”

And with these strange and pitiable words, she fell to sobbing as if her great heart would burst at last.

CHAPTER XXIV.

There came a reaction, and Phoebe was prostrated with grief and alarm.  Her brother never doubted now that Reginald had run to Cape Town for a lark.  But Phoebe, though she thought so too, could not be sure; and so the double agony of bereavement and desertion tortured her by turns, and almost together.  For the first time these many years, she was so crushed she could not go about her business, but lay on a little sofa in her own room, and had the blinds down, for her head ached so she could not bear the light.

She conceived a bitter resentment against Staines; and told Dick never to let him into her sight, if he did not want to be her death.

In vain Dick made excuses for him:  she would hear none.  For once she was as unreasonable as any other living woman:  she could see nothing but that she had been happy, after years of misery, and should be happy now if this man had never entered her house.  “Ah, Collie!” she cried, “you were wiser than I was.  You as good as told me he would make me smart for lodging and curing him.  And I was so happy!”

Dale communicated this as delicately as he could to Staines.  Christopher was deeply grieved and wounded.  He thought it unjust, but he knew it was natural:  he said, humbly, “I feel guilty myself, Mr. Dale; and yet, unless I had possessed omniscience, what could I do?  I thought of her in all—­poor thing! poor thing!”

The tears were in his eyes, and Dick Dale went away scratching his head and thinking it over.  The more he thought, the less he was inclined to condemn him.

Staines himself was much troubled in mind, and lived on thorns.  He wanted to be off to England; grudged every day, every hour, he spent in Africa.  But Mrs. Falcon was his benefactress; he had been, for months and months, garnering up a heap of gratitude towards her.  He had not the heart to leave her bad friends, and in misery.  He kept hoping Falcon would return, or write.

Two days after his return, he was seated, disconsolate, gluing garnets and carbuncles on to a broad tapering bit of lambskin, when Ucatella came to him and said, “My doctor child sick?”