dangerous place. We
have never conquered the Mambava; they are a ferocious people, and the
man who enters their country does so at his own risk. Had it not been
that Mr. Teck's venture, because of his peculiar relationship to King
Muene-Motapa, might end in winning over the Mambava to peaceful labor
and trade, we should never have given permission. As for you, madam,
such a journey is not to be thought of. I say nothing about the
climate at this season. But, if you will pardon me, as I look at you
the idea of your traveling inland on safari at any time of year--in
fact, I ask myself----" He stared round him at the mildewed, white
walls, and explained, "I ask myself, indeed, if you are real."

For even in her white terai and belted suit of white linen she was a
vision appropriate only to the far-off world that this man had left
behind him at the call of duty--a world of delicate living and subtle
sensations, of frail flesh in luxurious settings, of sophistication
that would have shrunk from every crudity, and exquisiteness that would
have shriveled at the touch of hardship. This studious-looking,
fever-stricken soldier, a nobleman under a bygone regime and in his
youth a great amateur of love, had known well many women of whom this
suppliant was the virtual counterpart, fragile, complex, too sensitive,
too ardent, the predestined prey of impulses and disabilities that none
but themselves, their adorers, and specialists in neurasthenia, could
conceive of. In the present woman he discerned the same lovely and
neurotic countenance, the same traces of mingled fastidiousness and
desperation, the same promises of exceptionally passionate and tragic
happenings.

"Ah, yes," he reflected, coughing feebly, so as not to make his head
ache, "ah, yes, she is fatal. Twenty years ago I would have killed men
for her with pleasure," he told himself, watching her pale, golden
face. "Fatal! fatal!"--but he did not ask himself what fatality had
brought her here. He knew her story, as by this time every one knew it
who had ever heard of Lawrence Teck, or David Verne, or her.

"So it is this one that she really loves?" he thought, contemplating
rather dismally her bitten lips, her lowered eyelashes, the throb of
her throat, the working of her slim fingers. "I know: now she must
find him quickly, quickly, quickly. She cannot sleep; she cannot eat;
but she can drink, because she is always burning; and she can think,
yes--but one