Chapter 44

"'But, my dear,' he stammered, and then suddenly he began to cough. A dreadful, tearing cough, which shook him from head to foot; a cough which stained his handkerchief with scarlet. And into the eyes of the woman there came a look of shrinking fear, to be replaced almost at once by something very different. Her husband, doubled up in his paroxysm, saw nothing, and a bunch of mere natives didn't count. Hope, triumph, the way out, replaced fear in her eyes: she knew the poor brute who had been waiting for her for fo…