Page:A Prisoner of the Khaleefa.djvu/245

Rh to be placed in; but after considering the whole matter most carefully, I decided upon sending Hasseena off, and trusting to luck for the rest. I had hoped she might get married to some one in Omdurman, and then I should not have been afraid of her. But Hasseena returned in February, 1892, some months after my marriage with Umm es Shole, carrying a little bundle of male humanity, who had only been three or four months less tardy in arrival than Makkieh.

Hasseena, doubtless, had for me the Soudan equivalent for what we understand as affection; she had saved my life when we were first captured; she had nursed me, as only a woman can nurse one, through my first attack of typhus fever, and had kept me from starvation during the famine. But while I could not forget all this, I could not forget also that she had become a source of great danger to me, and although my treatment of her in sending her away when I did, might to some appear harsh in the face of what she had done for me, it must not be forgotten that self-preservation is no less a law of nature in the Soudan than it is elsewhere. I supported Hasseena for nearly two years, when her child died. She then left Khartoum, where I was still a chained prisoner at large, and went utterly to the bad. I heard of her from time to time, and, on my release in September last, hearing that she was at Berber, I delayed there until I had hunted her out of the den of vice in which she was living, and provided for her elsewhere, only to receive a telegram a few weeks later to say that,