I learned from inquiries addressed to the

    Family Herald

   (correspondence column) that the Soudan was then, even as it is now, the land safest against English law. Spain, in this respect, was reckoned a bad second.

   The very next day I again broached the subject of foreign travel to my mother. It was already obvious that the frost would not last for ever. Once the snow melted, once the crushed mass that had been a baronet was discovered, circumstantial evidence would point to Philippa. True, there was no one save myself who could positively

    swear

   that Philippa had killed Sir Runan. Again, though I could positively swear it, my knowledge was only an inference of my own. Philippa herself had completely forgotten the circumstance. But the suspicions of the Bearded Woman and of the White Groom were sure to be aroused, and the Soudan I resolved to seek without an hour's delay.

   I reckoned without my hostess.

   My mother at first demurred.

   'You certainly don't look well, Basil. But why the Soudan?'

   'A whim, a sick man's fancy. Perhaps because it is not so very remote from Old Calabar, the country of Philippa's own father. Mother, tell me, how do you like her?'

   'She is the woman you love, and however shady her antecedents, however peculiar her style of conversation, she is, she must be, blameless. To say more, after so short an acquaintance, might savour of haste and exaggeration.'

   A woman's logic!

   'Then you

    will

   come to the Soudan with us to-morrow?'

   'No, my child, further south than Spain I will

    not

   go, not this journey!'

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