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Drink made men madmen. Drink rotted their bodies and corrupted their souls. Drink brought ruin in this world and damnation in the next.
    Allnutt had filled the other mug overside, and was now decanting water into the gin, trying carefully but not very effectively to prevent too much river alluvium from entering his drink. Rose watched with increasing fascination. She wanted to protest, to appeal to Allnutt’s better feelings, even to snatch the terrible thing from him, and yet she stayed inert, unmoving. Possibly it was that common sense of hers which kept her quiescent. Allnutt drank the frightful stuff and smacked his lips.
    “That’s better,” he said.
    He put the mug down. He did not start to be maniacal, nor to sing songs, nor to reel about the boat. Instead, with his sinfulness still wet on his lips, he swung open the gates of paradise for Rose.
    “Now I can think about supper,” he said. “What about a cup o’ tea, Miss?”
    Tea! Heat and thirst and fatigue and excitement had done their worst for Rose. She was limp and weary, and her throat ached. The imminent prospect of a cup of tea roused her to trembling excitement. Twelve cups of tea, each, Samuel and she had drunk daily for years. To-day she had had none—she had eaten no food either, but at the moment that meant nothing to her. Tea! A cup of tea! Two cups of tea! Half a dozen great mugs of tea, strong, delicious, revivifying! Her mind was suffused with rosy pictures of an evening’s tea drinking, a debauch compared with which the spring sowing festivities at the village by the mission station were only a pale shade.
    “I’d like a cup of tea,” she said.
    “Water’s still boiling in the engine,” said Allnutt, heaving himself to his feet. “Won’t take a minute.”
    The tinned meat that they ate was reduced, as a result of the heat, to a greasy semi-liquid mass. The native bread was dark and unpalatable. But the tea was marvelous. Rose was forced to use sweetened condensed milk in it, which she hated—at the mission they had cows until Von Hanneken commandeered them—but not even that spoilt her enjoyment of the tea. She drank it strong, mug after mug of it, as she had promised herself, with never a thought of what it was doing inside her to the lining of her stomach; probably it was making as pretty a picture of that as ever she had seen at a Band of Hope lantern lecture where they exhibited enlarged photographs of a drunkard’s liver. For a moment her body temperature shot up to fever heat, but presently there came a blissful perspiration—not the sticky, prickly sweat in which she moved all day long, but a beneficent and cooling fluid, bringing with it a feeling of ease and well-being.
    “Those Belgians up at the mine wouldn’t never drink tea,” said Allnutt, tilting the condensed milk tin over his mug of black liquid. “They didn’t know what was good.”
    “Yes,” said Rose. She felt positive friendship for Allnutt welling up within her. She slapped at the mosquitoes without irritation.
    When the scanty crockery had been washed and put away, Allnutt stood up and looked about him; the light was just failing.
    “Ain’t seen no crocodiles in this arm, Miss, ’ave you?” he asked.
    “No,” said Rose.
    “No shallows for ’em ’ere,” said Allnutt. “And current’s too fast.”
    He coughed a little self-consciously.
    “I want to ’ave a bath before bedtime,” he said.
    “So do I.”
    “I’ll go up in the bows an’ ’ave mine ’olding on to the anchor chain,” said Allnutt. “You stay down ’ere and do what you like, Miss. Then if we don’t look, it won’t matter.”
    Rose found herself stripping herself naked right out in the open, with a man only a dozen feet away doing the same, and only a slender funnel six inches thick between them. Somehow it did not matter. Rose was conscious that out of the tail of her eye she could see a greyish-white shape lower itself over the launch’s bows, and she could hear