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“‘Two years had now passed, I still crazy mad–knowing nothing, thinking nothing–one blind idolatry! One morning I found a note on my table; she was going to Venice. I was not to follow until she sent for me. She never sent–not a line–no message. Then the truth came out–she never intended to send–she was tired of it all!’

“The young fellow rose from his seat and began pacing the dirt floor again. He seemed strangely stirred. I waited for the sequel, but he kept silent.

“‘Is this why you came here?’ I asked.

“‘Yes and no. I came here because one of my brother officers is at one of the stations up the river, and because here I could be lost. You can explain it as you will, but go where I may I live in deadly fear of meeting the man I wronged. Here he can’t hunt me, as he has done all over Europe. If we meet there is but one thing left–either I must kill him or he will kill me. I would have faced him at any time but for her. Now I could not harm him. We have both suffered from the same cause–the loss of a woman we loved. I had caused his agony and it is for me to make amends, but not by sending him to his grave. Here he is out of my way and I out of his. You saw me burn that letter; I have destroyed dozens of them. When I can stand the pressure no longer I sit down and ask his pardon; then I tear it up or burn it. He couldn’t understand–wouldn’t understand. He’d think I was afraid to meet him and was begging for my life. Don’t you see how impossible it all is–how damnably I am placed?'”

Mme. Constantin and the others had gathered closer to where Bayard sat. Even the wife of the young secretary had moved her chair so she could look into the speaker’s face. All were absorbed in the story. Bayard went on:–

“One of the queer things about the African fever is the way it affects the brain. The delirium passes when the temperature goes down, but certain hallucinations last sometimes for weeks. How much of the queer story was true, therefore, and how much was due to his convalescence–he was by no means himself again–I could not decide. That a man should lose his soul and freedom over a woman was not new, but that he should bury himself in the jungle to keep from killing a man whose pardon he wanted to ask for betraying his wife was new.

“I sympathized with him, of course, telling him he was too young to let the world go by; that when the husband got cool he would give up the chase–had given it up long ago, no doubt, now that he realized how good for nothing the woman was–said all the things, of course, one naturally says to a man you suspect to be slightly out of his head.

“The next night Judson returned. He brought newspapers and letters, and word from the outside world; among other things that he had met a man at the landing below who was on his way to the camp above us. He had offered to bring him with him, but he had engaged some Zanzibari of his own and intended to make a shorter route to the north of our camp and then join one of the bands in charge of an Arab trader-some of Tippu-Tib’s men really. He knew of the imminence of the rainy season and wanted, to return to Zanzibar before it set in in earnest. Judson’s news–all his happenings, for that matter–interested the young Belgian even more than they did me, and before the week was out the two were constantly together–a godsend in his present state of mind–saved him in fact from a relapse, I thought–Judson’s odd way of looking at things, as well as his hard, common sense, being just what the high-strung young fellow needed most.