vegetation and murderous
life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the
hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as
it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What
things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water flooding past
Matadi--and wallowed in it? Its faint perfume hints at that.

On the deck of the yacht, under the double awning, Berselius was seated,
and, close to him, Adams. They had arrived only yesterday, and to-morrow
they were proceeding by rail to Leopoldville, which was to be the real
base of the expedition, leaving _La Joconde_ behind at Matadi.

The yacht would return to France.

"What a lot of stuff they are loading on those ships," said Adams, turning
in his chair as the roar and rattle of the winch chains, that had ceased
for a moment, flared up again like a flame of sound. "What are the exports
here?"

"Gum copal--nuts--rubber--tusks--everything you can get out of there,"
answered Berselius, lazily waving a hand to indicate the Congo basin.

Adams, leaning back in his deck chair, followed with his eyes the sweep of
Berselius's hand, "over there"; little did he dream of what those words
held in their magic.

Then Berselius went below.

The moon rose; lights speckled the misty wharf and a broad road of silver
lay stretched across the moving water to the other bank that, under the
moonlight, lay like a line of cotton-wool. It was the mist tangled by and
tangling the trees.

Adams paced the deck, smoking and occasionally pausing to flip off his
cigar-ash on the bulwark rail. He was thinking of Maxine Berselius. She
had come to Marseilles to see them off, and----

Not a word had been exchanged between them that a third person did not
hear or might not have heard, yet they had told each other the whole of
that delightful story in which the hero is I and the heroine You.

Adams on his side and Maxine on hers did not in the least contemplate
possibilities. A social river, wide as the Congo, and flowing from as
mysterious a source, lay between them. Maxine was rich--so rich that the
contrast of her wealth with his own poverty shut the door for Adams on the
idea of marriage. He could not hope to take his true place in the world
for years, and he would not stoop to take a woman's money or assistance.

He was too big to go through a back door. No, he would enter the social
temple by walking between the pillars o