I tore it open and read: 

“My dear Hubert,—­I know you will come; I know you will follow me.  So I am leaving this letter at Donald Currie & Co.’s office, giving their agent instructions to hand it to you as soon as you reach Cape Town.  I am quite sure you will track me so far at least; I understand your temperament.  But I beg you, I implore you, to go no further.  You will ruin my plan if you do.  And I still adhere to it.  It is good of you to come so far; I cannot blame you for that.  I know your motives.  But do not try to find me out.  I warn you, beforehand, it will be quite useless.  I have made up my mind.  I have an object in life, and, dear as you are to me—­that I will not pretend to deny—­I can never allow even you to interfere with it.  So be warned in time.  Go back quietly by the next steamer.

“Your ever attached and grateful,

“Hilda.”

I read it twice through with a little thrill of joy.  Did any man ever court so strange a love?  Her very strangeness drew me.  But go back by the next steamer!  I felt sure of one thing:  Hilda was far too good a judge of character to believe that I was likely to obey that mandate.

I will not trouble you with the remaining stages of my quest.  Except for the slowness of South African mail coaches, they were comparatively easy.  It is not so hard to track strangers in Cape Town as strangers in London.  I followed Hilda to her hotel, and from her hotel up country, stage after stage—­jolted by rail, worse jolted by mule-waggon—­inquiring, inquiring, inquiring—­till I learned at last she was somewhere in Rhodesia.

That is a big address; but it does not cover as many names as it covers square miles.  In time I found her.  Still, it took time; and before we met, Hilda had had leisure to settle down quietly to her new existence.  People in Rhodesia had noted her coming, as a new portent, because of one strange peculiarity.  She was the only woman of means who had ever gone up of her own free will to Rhodesia.  Other women had gone there to accompany their husbands, or to earn their livings; but that a lady should freely select that half-baked land as a place of residence—­a lady of position, with all the world before her where to choose—­that puzzled the Rhodesians.  So she was a marked person.  Most people solved the vexed problem, indeed, by suggesting that she had designs against the stern celibacy of a leading South African politician.  “Depend upon it,” they said, “it’s Rhodes she’s after.”  The moment I arrived at Salisbury, and stated my object in coming, all the world in the new town was ready to assist me.  The lady was to be found (vaguely speaking) on a young farm to the north—­a budding farm, whose general direction was expansively indicated to me by a wave of the arm, with South African uncertainty.