"What! has any thing happened to him?"

"Not that I know of. But he has started on a long and perilous
excursion; and whether he will ever return or not is more than I can
say."

"Then there is no hope," said Edith, in a voice of despair.

Dudleigh was silent for a time.

"I will tell you all," he replied at length. "When I left you I went at
once to Marseilles. I called on Sir Lionel's agents there, but found
that they had heard nothing from him whatever. They said that when he
last left that city he had gone to Turkey. I then set off for
Constantinople, and spent a week there, trying to find some traces of
him. At the British Embassy they said that he had only remained one day
in the city, and had then gone in his yacht, which he had brought with
him, on a cruise in the Black Sea. But whether he had returned or not no
one knew. At last I met with a merchant who knew him, and he told me
that he had returned and gone to Athens. I went to Athens, and found
that he had been there at one of the hotels, the landlord of which
informed me that he had spent three days there and had left for parts
unknown. I left letters at each of these places, and sent others to
Smyrna, Beyrout, Jaffa, and Alexandria. Then I returned to Marseilles.
There, to my surprise, I learned that, a few days after I left, they had
heard from Sir Lionel, who was in Alexandria, and about to start on the
maddest expedition that was ever heard of--a journey up the Nile, into
the inaccessible regions of Central Africa--to try to discover the
sources of that river. He simply announced to his agents that all his