g lantern Oscard saw Durnovo and Jack land from
the same boat.

The three men walked up to the house together. Marie was at the door,
and bowed her head gravely in answer to Jack's salutation. Durnovo
nodded curtly and said nothing.

In the sitting-room, by the light of the paraffin lamp, the two
Englishmen exchanged a long questioning glance, quite different from
the quick interrogation of a woman's eyes. There was a smile on Jack
Meredith's face.

"All ready to start to-morrow?" he inquired.

"Yes," replied Oscard.

And that was all they could say. Durnovo never left them alone together
that night. He watched their faces with keen, suspicious eyes. Behind
the moustache his lips were pursed up in restless anxiety. But he saw
nothing--learnt nothing. These two men were inscrutable.

At eleven o'clock the next morning the Simiacine seekers left their
first unhappy camp at Msala. They had tasted of misfortune at the very
beginning, but after the first reverse they returned to their work
with that dogged determination which is a better spirit than the wild
enthusiasm of departure, where friends shout and flags wave, and an
artificial hopefulness throws in its jarring note.

They had left behind them with the artifice of civilisation that subtle
handicap of a woman's presence; and the little flotilla of canoes that
set sail from the terrace at Msala one morning in November, not so many
years ago, was essentially masculine in its bearing. The four white
men--quiet, self-contained, and intrepid--seemed to work together with
a perfect unity, a oneness of thought and action which really lay in the
brain of one of them. No man can define a true leader; for one is too
autocratic and the next too easily led; one is too quick-tempered,
another too reserved. It would almost seem that the ideal leader is that
man who knows how to extract from the brains of his subordinates all
that is best and strongest therein--who knows how to suppress his
own individuality, and merge it for the time being into that of his
fellow-worker--whose influence is from within and not from without.

The most successful Presidents of Republics have been those who are, or
pretend to be, nonentities, content to be mere pegs, standing still and
lifeless, for things to be hung upon. Jack Meredith was, or pretended to
be, this. He never assumed the airs of a leader. He never was a leader.
He merely smoothed things over, suggested here, laughed there, and