"Mary Johnstone has clearly bewitched you," the clergyman remarked. "Your very step is lighter than it was an hour ago, and you are looking better than you have done all winter. Would it be indiscreet to ask what spell she cast upon you?"
"I am afraid it would," Lilian answered, while a softness crept into her face. She laughed, and henceforward chatted so brightly that when she left him her companion looked after her longingly, and then sighed as he turned back to his bachelor quarters. They struck him as very cheerless and lonely.
A week had passed when Miss Chatterton, sitting alone, listlessly took up a newspaper a maid brought in. The listlessness vanished, however, when a heading, "Further Fighting in the Dark Continent," caught her eye, and she eagerly hurried through an account of the reverses suffered by a British punitive expedition in West Africa. Then, while her heart beat fast, she sat very still, staring at the concluding paragraph:
A French trader brought news to the coast of another unfortunate affair in the hinterland. It appears that two Englishmen, Dane and Maxwell, who left the coast months earlier, on a prospecting expedition, lost their carriers by sickness, and have since been hemmed in by hostile natives in a perilous position. Our correspondent states that the French authorities, who warned them against the expedition, consider their extrication impossible, and believe they must have perished already.
Lilian let the paper fall from her nerveless hands, and lay motionless, shivering in her chair. The shock of a supposed discovery, and a jealousy she would not own, had played their part in forcing on her attention a question she had resolutely striven to ignore, while now, when it was perhaps too late forever, the answer was clear. She could deceive herself no longer; and she guessed why the man had risked his life to win a little gold in Africa. Risked it—at the thought her eyes grew hazy. It might well be that he had flung his life away! Yet, even then, it was with a passing thrill of pride that she remembered the stubbornness beneath his patience, and knew that it would go very hard with his enemies before he went down.
Hilton Dane had changed swiftly in her estimation from a man with a weakness to a hero, generous, loyal, swift to do her pleasure, and yet fitted to command. It seemed to her overstrained fancy that she could almost hear his voice ringing through the blast of the rifles in the last struggle; and that it would be a very grim and terrible struggle she knew. Then she shuddered once more, recollecting what she had read of the scenes within an African stockade when the rifles lay cold in the undergrowth, and the smoke of the flintlocks had melted away.
The sense of constraint inside grew unbearable, and the girl went forth into the night, and stood bareheaded, staring into the darkness, hoping, though almost afraid to hope, that the man she had sent away had not passed forever beyond her power to recall him.
Chatterton and his wife, returning presently, found her waiting in the hall; and the iron-master's action was characteristic when he had glanced at the paper she handed him. Wrenching out his notebook he wrote on the first blank leaf the address of a firm dealing in palm oil in Liverpool, and then a message beneath it:
"See newspaper report of disaster to West Coast explorers, Dane and Maxwell. Wire your agents to find out how much is true, and all possible details. Spare no expense whatever."
He flung the paper to the groom outside.