Her ladyship looked up steadily.
“Guy Oscard, for instance,” she said; “I don't quite understand Guy Oscard, Millicent.”
The girl turned away impatiently. She was keenly alive to the advantage of turning her face away. For in her pocket she had at that moment a letter from Guy Oscard—the last relic of the old excitement which was so dear to her, and which she was already beginning to miss. Joseph had posted this letter in Msala nearly two months before. It had travelled down from the Simiacine Plateau with others, in a parcel beneath the mattress of Jack Meredith's litter. It was a letter written in good faith by an honest, devoted man to the woman whom he looked upon already as almost his wife—a letter which no man need have been ashamed of writing, but which a woman ought not to have read unless she intended to be the writer's wife.
Millicent had read this letter more than once. She liked it because it was evidently sincere. The man's heart could be heard beating in every line of it. Moreover, she had made inquiries that very morning at the Post Office about the African mail. She wanted the excitement of another letter like that.
“Oh, Guy Oscard!” she replied innocently to Lady Cantourne; “that was nothing.”
Lady Cantourne kept silence, and presently she returned to her letters.
CHAPTER XXXVIII. THE ACCURSED CAMP
Here—judge if hell, with all its power to damn,
Can add one curse to the foul thing I am—
There are some places in the world where a curse seems to brood in the atmosphere. Msala was one of these. Perhaps these places are accursed by the deeds that have been done there. Who can tell?