illa declared, with a profound
animosity to that huntress whose body was so strong, whose nerves were
so sound, whose courage had been proved in the face of charging lions,
who took life without a twinge and doubtless gloated over the blood
that she had shed.

Lawrence Teck, after a moment's struggle with himself, blurted out:

"I assure you that when we fellows dream of women it's of a different
sort."

"Oh, of course. Of the one that you've left behind, I suppose."

Sometimes, he assented presently; in which case the one at home would
be immensely enriched by that wide separation. But it often happened
that such an exile, when no specially congenial woman had given him her
heart, constructed from his imagination an ideal, a vision capable of
brightening the wilderness with the most exquisite charms. Or else he
might find an unattainable ideal ready-made. Thus it was that uncouth
sailors, on long voyages, treasured the photographs of unknown
actresses in fancy costume, as a religious devotee might treasure an
ikon. Or thus a soldier in some Congo fort, while gradually succumbing
to the malefic spell of the encircling forests, yearned toward the
portrait of a princess that he had clipped from an old illustrated
magazine--toward a divinity whom he could never know, but whom he
adored because her nature and life were so different from his.

"How romantic men are!" she exclaimed, turning away her head.

He seemed abashed; but he returned:

"And are women never tempted to renounce that famous practicality of
theirs?"

She walked on along the terrace. The moonlight intensified her
ethereal aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the
contrast between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength.

At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according
with the faltering of her heart beats. But it was in an almost
indifferent tone that she inquired:

"You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?"

"Yes, everything's settled."

She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal
from that scene of its peculiar charm.

"Why are you returning?"

He hesitated. Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far
north of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the
stone city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were
supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the
fabled Land of Ophir. Who