knowledge went, under two heads. Under the first he grouped all attempts to intercept communications, as for instance the capturing of the Intelligence Cipher, and intercommunication between conspirators, such as the arrangement of a code. Secondly, there were active measures of revolt, the only one which he had yet discovered being the spreading of discontent amongst the Sudanese troops. He must needs accept the fact that his enemies had succeeded as regarded group number one. How were the active revolutionary measures likely to develop? To begin with, he was bound to assume that the opportunity was now or never. Granted that the move of the XXth Battalion was being advertised as an attempt to send Sudanese troops to India, this theory could only remain credible while the advance company was actually travelling north. The moment they turned southeast again towards Kassala, as would happen at once on their arrival at Atbara, the lie would be given to all such stories. How, then, would he himself act in such a case? Pressing his forehead down on his hands, he struggled to project himself into the position of an Egyptian officer bent on striking a deadly blow at the British occupation. "Time, now! Place-well, what condition must the place fulfil?" He ran through the strategic considerations bearing on locality. Absence of a possibly hostile military force. Presence of confederates. Position on lines of communication. Accessibility to large and warlike native communities capable of being inflamed by Islamic propaganda. Burke rose from his chair, selected and lit a cigarette, and glanced down at the lights of the village. "Abu Zait," he said. The possibilities of the position gripped him till he forgot to be a partisan and remembered only that he was a soldier. Eagerly he took up point after point of his plan. He would inflame the Sudanese till every man on that steamer was ready to shoot the first British officer that appeared. He could land at Abu Zait, shoot the Inspector, join hands with the already disaffected police, and raise the standard of revolt, calling to the Jihâd that splendid fighting tribe the Giloudi Arabs of the west. Then, with determined men at Wad Gharbu and Fula, two revolver shots would get rid of Purvis and Vachell, and it would be simple to inflame the whole of the XXth Battalion with a hatred of a distant campaign against the children of the Faith. Oh, how the rebellion grew! All the troops to the south in arms against the Government, the few British in the Bahr - el-Ghazal murdered or starved out, the Arabs in fanatical revolt, the wild Sudanese tribes joining their brothers in the battalions and leaping to arms. What could the handful of white troops in Khartum effect against such a conflagration? What, indeed! The zest of invention left him, and he saw himself seemed to move through wide not leading a successful revolt, verdure, for the steamer had but confronting one. Granted not yet rounded the point that a conspiracy was on foot, where she would be visible it must develop on these lines upon the river. or not at all. Well, a conspiracy was on foot. So much for the Inspector at Abu Zait. His duty was clear. He must board the ship at once on its arrival and put it to the men themselves that their destination was Kassala, and Kassala only. "Fool," said an inner voice, "do you imagine that they will let you reach the deck?" "If it must be," came the answer, "death is no sweeter on the shore than on the gangway. Do your duty, and God help you!" And Burke, with his mind at last free from doubt, lay down to a slumber that was quiet and undisturbed. Sleep is but a short respite in the struggle that we call life. The new dawn crept up, pale and cold, into the darkness of the East. It grew and strengthened, embraced the world in its white arms, trembled, blushed crimson, and gave place to day. "My last, perhaps!" Burke sat up and swept the horizon with his glance, conscious of the abrupt transit from drowsy freedom to the high and perhaps tragic duties of his awakening. There to the south was the smoke column of the Nasser, black and dense at the funnel top, fanned out into grey gauze above under the gentle buffets of the morning breeze. It Burke rose, dressed hurriedly, took his revolver from its case, then after a moment's thought replaced it and picked up a camel stick instead, and having swallowed a cup of tea and a biscuit that Mahmud had put ready for him in the verandah, started for the landing-stage. Quite a large group had formed there, officers, civilians, employees, a fatigue-party to help with the wood, and the usual contingent of onlookers. Mansur Effendi could be seen in earnest conversation with the medical officer a little apart from the others. Burke passed through the crowd, acknowledging salutes to left and right, and placed himself at the edge of the wharf as the little vessel, sweeping from the far bank, came alongside with her nose up-stream against the current. Ropes were flung and caught, the stern dragged level, a plank passed across as a gangway, and Burke, with a glance up at the sea of wild black faces on the steamer's deck, stepped boldly on to the narrow timber. The mind works rapidly at such a moment. Love of life, fear of death, swift speculation as to the manner of it, whether a blinding rifle-flash from above or the cold pang of a dagger from behind!-all these ideas leaped together into one instant of thought. A voice rang out shrill and piercing from the ship. 'Stop him! Seize him!" Cries rose on all sides, and the soldiers on the boat swarmed madly to the foot of the gangway. Burke lifted his eyes. An Egyptian officer with fierce anxiety written on his face, and an outstretched finger pointing full at him, was calling to those on shore to stop him. A cold, slow, incisive voice in his inmost heart said, "God help me. It is the end." With shoulders squared and head thrown back, he took a pace forward. Crash! The plank broke under him, and with a wild sway and a clutch at the gunwale, Burke drove downward into the brown billows of the flood. A swirl of broken light and rising bubbles, a sickening shock driving through his being like red fire, and he knew no more. A fortnight had passed, and Burke, propped up on pillows in his quarters and well on the way to recovery, could look back at his obsession with comprehension, almost with amusement. He had heard the whole story of his accident in minute detail from several sources-from the doctor, the staff-officer, and even Mansur himself, the hero of the event. They described how Burke had stepped heavily on to the plank-an old one, that should never have been used for the purpose. At this point of the story the staff-officer added that the sergeant in charge of the landing-stage was now awaiting trial. Suddenly those on the ship had noticed that the plank was giving underneath. They had shouted; Burke, apparently confused, had stepped forward, putting all his weight just over the crack and had completed the mischief, falling in between the steamer and the wharf and striking his head against the keel. Mansur Effendi, well known as one of the best swimmers in his native town of Benha, had promptly dived under the steamer, grasped the sinking officer, and aided by the soldiers dragged him on to the bank farther down stream. It had been a gallant rescue, for the flooded river was sweeping north with tremendous force, and none but the strongest of swimmers could have withstood its current. Mansur, feeling a proprietary interest in the man whom he had saved, and not unmoved perhaps by this great obligation conferred upon a high official, had watched with the doctor, and between them, after unremitting care, both night and day, they had tided him through the severe concussion and the attack of fever that had followed. Old Billal, too, sent back by Purvis Bey a week later, had been unwearied in his watching and care, and now all was well. As for the conspiracy, Burke had quite lost faith in it. Mansur had proved himself a good man and true. So had the doctor. A letter from Purvis, sent by Billal, brought the news that the rumour about India had resulted from a paragraph in that highly readable paper, 'El Lewa,' an ornament of the Egyptian press that sometimes finds its way into the Sudan. Purvis had been told at once by his Sudanese officers, and had given the report the lie and calmed their apprehensions. All that remained for clearing up was that wire from the Intelligence, and Burke was momentarily expecting light on this subject, as the long-awaited post-boat had just arrived and the letters were even now being sorted. In a few moments Burke's mail was brought in by the postal orderly. Discarding even his home letters in his eagerness to see what Chesterfield Smith had to say, he picked up an official envelope marked "Strictly Confidential," opened it only to find a second labelled "Secret," and finally took out the letter itself. It ran as follows: Egyptian officials, among them being Mansur Effendi and Ahmed Hamdi in your district. Pending inquiry it was thought prudent to put you on your guard, and similar telegrams were sent to several other British officers in out-stations. "I may tell you confidentially that, with the single exception of yourself, all of them found reason to suspect the officers mentioned to them, and their suspicions have since proved groundless. I am permitted to tell you that your confidence in your officers has been much appreciated by the Sirdar, who considers that it points to a very satisfactory cooperation between you and them. You will be pleased to hear that he has selected you for the post of Senior Inspector in Kassala Province, and your promotion appears in this week's 'Gazette.' Allow me to be the first to congratulate you, and believe me, yours very sincerely, "R. CHESTERFIELD-SMITH." "DEAR BURKE, I gather from your reply to my cipher telegram that you have had no anxiety about the loyalty of your staff at Abu Zait. This is merely to say that we have since found out that the information leading to the warning sent you was quite unreliable. A clerk, dismissed from Government service as a result of accusations brought against him by some of his fellow employees, came to the Sirdar with a very complete account of a plot against the Government, which he substantiated with a number of documents, since proved to be forgeries. His story implicated many long!" The letter dropped from Burke's fingers. He felt confused and weak, inclined to titter in titter in the helpless way that comes during convalescence. A step sounded on the threshold, and Mansur, his face wreathed in obsequious smiles and a copy of the 'Gazette' in his hand, hastened forward. "Saatle Bey!" he cried, "Inshallah ashoofak Basha badein!" "Please God, I may see you a Pasha before S. LYLE. THE WIFE OF BENEDICT ARNOLD. BY MRS ANDREW LANG. ENGLISH people are fre- his wife and daughter, it was quently reproached by their Scottish friends with ignorance of and indifference to their own family history. Very probably I should have fallen under the same condemnation but for the thrilling discovery made in my childhood that two of the regicides, Mayne and Harrison, were to be numbered amongst my direct ancestors. The fact inspired me with some awe but no great indignation, Stuart partisanship only being awakened in me under stress of opposition; and I was far more interested in the tale told me a few years later of the wooing of Abby Willing, my grandmother's first cousin, by Louis Philippe in 1797. This was romance indeed, and from that day I felt a sort of personal property in the French crown (then worn by Napoleon III.), regardless of the circumstance that the sturdy good sense of Thomas Willing turned a deaf ear to the royal suitor. "No, sir! Poor and an exile, you are no fit match for my daughter; and were you to succeed to the throne of France, she would be no fit match for you." From this position nothing would move Thomas. Indeed, how was it possible for any man to give the lie to so neatly turned a peroration? Yet my old aunts loved to tell me that when fifty years later Louis Philippe fled to England with a matter of common talk, amongst many who saw the exiled Queen, that Marie Amélie closely resembled the pictures taken in her girlhood of Abby Willing. of Still, even the episode Louis Philippe paled in fascination before the dark tragedy of Benedict Arnold, familiar to me in the pages of Mrs Markham; for was not his wife, Peggy Shippen, a cousin of my own, although as I was English she seemed more remote than she would have done to a child on the other side of the Border. The Shippens, had I known it, figured in history long before Peggy's time, and were cultivated, academic, perhaps narrowminded Tories. Peggy's own ancestor, Edward Shippen, went over to Boston in 1688, shortly before William of Orange landed at Torbay, but he very soon moved to Philadelphia, where the family established themselves. Edward turned Quaker, grew rich, and ultimately was elected the first Mayor of his adopted town. Edward's nephew William remained in England and entered Parliament in 1707: from 1713 till his death in 1743 he represented_the borough of Newton in Lancashire, and speedily earned the respect (though not the |