And Strangemore in those days was imperturbably good-natured. He acceded to everything Ferris proposed. His most impracticable schemes and plans were met with careless raillery and final acquiescence. “Where thou goest I will go,” Strangemore said to him one day, with a veiled significance, that thrilled the coward’s heart with deadly terror. He grew desperate. “The best of friends must part,” he said to Strangemore, veiling his uneasiness under a light laugh. “To-morrow I shall bid you farewell, ‘it may be for years and it may be forever.’ I have joined a party going on an exploring tour into Egypt and Africa.” Strangemore stared at him a moment, then he gave a reckless laugh. “There is nothing that would please me better than such a tramp,” he said. “Fancy gazing at the sphinx in Egypt, then shooting lions and tigers in the African jungles. Your friends must take me, too, Ferris, I would not miss the sport for the world!” Ferris turned upon his heel with a muttered imprecation, and a frown as black as night. “Your doom be on your own head, my implacable blood-hound,” he raged within himself, “I owe you no pity and no mercy. You took Sibyl from me, and now you have chosen to hunt me down because I revenged myself for her cursed falsity. So be it, my handsome Irresistable, but you have sealed your own fate. You will never come out of the African jungles alive. You will be the first tiger slain!” * * * * * So it fell out that in those golden May days while Nina was being tried for her life, the two men who had such a terrible interest in each other sat by night around their camp-fires amid Egyptian wilds, and thought awake, and sleeping dreamed, of the two fair women who had so blended with the current of their lives that they were exiles now for their sakes--the one dead by the assassin’s stroke, the other by the work of a doom self-sought. And who could measure the agonizing remorse that preyed upon these two men’s hearts. Not Talbot Strangemore surely, the victim of a mad remorse that “spurned atonement’s power.” A ghost went with him through those days and nights of reckless tramping and suicidal exposure. It was the ghost of the fair and trusting bride his sin had slain. And ever and always the white arms beckoned him, the dark eyes prayed him, the faint voice appealed to him to come to her. He had one answer always to excuse his tarrying: “Wait a little while, my darling, until I have brought home his guilt to Sibyl’s murderer, and cleared your memory from all stain, and then I will hasten to greet you in the spirit land.” Only for that mission that held him back, Talbot Strangemore would have sought death even as Nina had sought it. He was unutterably wretched, remorseful beyond all telling, and his love for the young bride, loved too late, was deeper than all. The passionate, despairing strength of his love for the dead girl startled him by its yearning force.