And
she bravely responded. She could and did lend him enough of her mind to
make it worth his while. A friend should not come home to her from
perils of land and sea, and find her ungrateful--a niggard of sympathy
and praise.
So that when Dr. and Mrs. Roughsedge appeared, and Muriel returned with
them, Mrs. Roughsedge, all on edge with anxiety, could make very little
of what had--what must have--occurred. Diana, carved in white wax, but
for the sensitive involuntary movements of lip and eyebrow, was
listening to a description of an English embassy sent through the length
and breadth of the most recently conquered province of Nigeria. The
embassy took the news of peace and Imperial rule to a country devastated
the year before by the most hideous of slave-raids. The road it marched
by was strewn with the skeletons of slaves--had been so strewn probably
for thousands of years. "One night my horse trod unawares on two
skeletons--women--locked in each other's arms," said Hugh; "scores of
others round them. In the evening we camped at a village where every
able-bodied male had been killed the year before."
"Shot?" asked the doctor.
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