It was not Henderson, the Native Commissioner, for she would have seen him before his bath, walking ahead of his carriers on the look-out for game. The bath and the camp gear were too new for old Palmer, the trader, making his round of inspection of native storemen. If it were Father Dupont, of the French Fathers, she would not have expected a bath at all.
The deductive methods of Mr. Sherlock Holmes failing her, she decided to see for herself. Scrambling downhill, through the litter of grey sandstone, split apart by trunks of trees, and crowned with euphorbias, she reached the path before the wayfarer had come in sight, and since conventions, even of the English, are sometimes superseded in lonely places, she advanced some way along it to meet him.
Where the path swerved to avoid a big mupundu tree, she found him. A tall young man, leaning on a stick, whipped off his sun helmet and grasped her hand.
She noticed that his hair curled and caught the sun. She noticed that his clothes, the ordinary clothes of a ulendo—khaki shirt and shorts, puttees and heavy boots—were newer than that part of the country generally saw. He bore himself with an air, and two tall natives at his back, shouldering guns, added a pleasantly piratical touch.
'My name's Ward,' he said. 'You must be Lady Norah Sinclair, whom I've heard so much about.'
'I don't know who from!' she laughed.
'Every one, since I landed at Cape Town,' he asserted, looking at her fixedly.
'They haven't forgotten how to tell pleasant lies in England,' she smiled back. 'I'll bet you never heard of our existence, till you stopped with the White Fathers on the Chambezi, three days' journey back.'
'I assure you,' he began, then broke off. 'Anyhow, you've forgotten my existence.'
She stared at him. A light dawned.