this----'
I could bear no more. I am a tender-hearted man, and I made some excuse
and got away. From the expression on the girl's face I could see that
it was only a question of days before she gave her heart to this
romantic newcomer.
* * * * *
As a matter of fact, it was on the following afternoon that she called
on me and told me that the worst had happened. I had known her from a
child, you understand, and she always confided her troubles to me.
'I want your advice,' she began. 'I'm so wretched!'
She burst into tears. I could see the poor girl was in a highly nervous
condition, so I did my best to calm her by describing how I had once
done the long hole in four. My friends tell me that there is no finer
soporific, and it seemed as though they may be right, for presently,
just as I had reached the point where I laid my approach-putt dead from
a distance of fifteen feet, she became quieter. She dried her eyes,
yawned once or twice, and looked at me bravely.
'I love Eddie Denton!' she said.
'I feared as much. When did you feel this coming on?'
'It crashed on me like a thunderbolt last night after dinner. We were
walking in the garden, and he was just telling me how he had been
bitten by a poisonous zongo, when I seemed to go all giddy. When
I came to myself I was in Eddie's arms. His face was pressed against
mine, and he was gargling.'
'Gargling?'
'I thought so at first. But he reassured me. He was merely speaking in
one of the lesser-known dialects of the Walla-Walla natives of Eastern
Uganda, into which he always drops in moments of great emotion. He soon
recovered sufficiently to give me a rough translation, and then I knew
that he loved me. He kissed me. I kissed him. We kissed each other.'
'And where was Mortimer all this while?'
'Indoors, cataloguing his collection of vases.'
For a moment, I confess, I was inclined to abandon Mortimer's cause. A
man, I felt, who could stay indoors cataloguing vases while his
fiancee wandered in the moonlight with explorers deserved all
that was coming to him. I overcame the feeling.
'Have you told him?'
'Of course not.'
'You don't think it might be of interest to him?'
'How can I tell him? It would break his heart. I am awfully fond of
Mortimer. So is Eddie. We would both die rather than do anything to
hurt him. Eddie is the soul of honour. He agrees with me that Mortimer
must never know.'
'Then you aren't going to break off your engagement?'
'I couldn't. Eddie feels the same. He says that, unless something can
be done, he will say good-bye to me and creep far, far away to some
distant desert, and there, in the great stillness, broken only by the
cry of the prowling yongo, try to forget.'
'When you say 'unless something can be done,' what do you mean? What
can be done?'
