she would not so dread the step which she had so long hesitated to
take.

So the evening that he received Clayton's letter Professor Porter
announced that they would leave for London the following week.

But once in London Jane Porter was no more tractable than she had
been in Baltimore. She found one excuse after another, and when,
finally, Lord Tennington invited the party to cruise around Africa
in his yacht, she expressed the greatest delight in the idea, but
absolutely refused to be married until they had returned to London.
As the cruise was to consume a year at least, for they were to
stop for indefinite periods at various points of interest, Clayton
mentally anathematized Tennington for ever suggesting such a
ridiculous trip.

It was Lord Tennington's plan to cruise through the Mediterranean,
and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and thus down the East Coast,
putting in at every port that was worth the seeing.

And so it happened that on a certain day two vessels passed in the
Strait of Gibraltar. The smaller, a trim white yacht, was speeding
toward the east, and on her deck sat a young woman who gazed with
sad eyes upon a diamondstudded locket which she idly fingered. Her
thoughts were far away, in the dim, leafy fastness of a tropical
jungle--and her heart was with her thoughts.

She wondered if the man who had given her the beautiful bauble,
that had meant so much more to him than the intrinsic value which
he had not even known could ever have meant to him, was back in