Sanders shifted uneasily in his chair.
"Oh—things," he said vaguely, and added: "You go home and marry that nice girl you used to rave about when you first came out."
Young Ludley went red under his tan.
"Look here, chief!" he said, half angrily, half apologetically, "you're surely not going to take any notice—you know it's the sort of thing that's done in black countries—oh, damn it all, you're not going to act as censor over my morals, are you?"
Sanders looked at the youth coldly.
"Your morals aren't worth worrying about," he said truthfully. "You could be the most depraved devil in the world—which I'll admit you aren't—and I should not trouble to reform you. No. It's the morals of my cannibals that worry me. Home you go, my son; get married, crescit sub pondere virtus—you'll find the translation in the foreign phrase department of any respectable dictionary. As to the sort of things that are done in black countries, they don't do them in our black countries—monkey tricks of that sort are good enough for the Belgian Congo, or for Togoland, but they aren't good enough for this little strip of wilderness."
Ludley went home.
He did not tell anybody the real reason why he had come home, because it would not have sounded nice. He was a fairly decent boy, as boys of his type go, and he said nothing worse about Sanders than that he was a woman-hater.
The scene that followed his departure shows how little the white mind differs from the black in its process of working. For, after seeing his assistant safely embarked on a homeward-bound boat, Sanders went up the river to Isisi, and there saw a woman who was called M'Lino.
The average black woman is ugly of face, but beautiful of figure, but M'Lino was no ordinary woman, as you shall learn. The Isisi people, who keep extraordinary records in their heads, the information being handed from father to son, say that M'Lino came from an Arabi family, and certainly if a delicately-chiselled nose, a refinement of lip, prove anything, they prove M'Lino came from no pure Bantu stock.