In the long, horror-haunted nights and days he cursed the memory of the fair coquette who had driven him mad with her sweet words and smiles until he had forgotten everything but his burning pain and his thirst for revenge. “I loved her, but I killed her. Ah, how horrible it is to love with such madness that one slays the heartless fair one who has wrought him woe!” he thought. He wearied of the idle dalliance of their life in Egypt. He longed to push on to Africa where the men talked of hunting lions and tigers. “That will be the sport for me,” he said to himself. “In the keen ardor of such pursuits, I may forget myself and forget her whom in my madness I slew.” But his comrades could not be induced to hasten their march into Africa. They had left one of their number sick in England and they could go no further without him. “We promised to wait for him here,” they said, “and we cannot afford to leave him. He is a noted hunter. He has been in Africa before, and he knows the route.” Strangemore and Ferris did not take much interest in the expected new-comer, until one day when they heard quite incidentally that he was an American. “But he will never return to his native land,” they said. “He is a misanthrope and a woman-hater. His life has been blasted by the falsity of his once idolized wife, and he has forsworn his country forever,” and then the two listeners felt as if they held some kinship with the absent man. CHAPTER XLII. THE NAYA HAYE. “If your friend does not come soon, gentlemen, I shall have to cut the country, even at the risk of losing your society. The Khamsin is getting to be more than I can bear,” Oswald Ferris said one night, as they lingered under the palm trees that skirted the camp that was pitched near the shores of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The dozen men who composed the party were disposed in various picturesque attitudes about the camp. The sport of the day had been fishing, and several were collected around a huge fire preparing supper, the air being highly impregnated with the odor of broiling fish. The clear soft moonlight and starlight glimmered down upon the animated scene, upon the stalwart forms and handsome faces of the men who were laughing and jesting in high enjoyment of the scene and the hour, unmindful of the grave, preoccupied faces of the two Americans whom they had become habituated to regard as deaths heads at the feast. Leaning lightly against a stately palm tree gazing in the brilliant moonlight at the lotus lillies rocking on the breast of the storied Nile, was Talbot Strangemore. He had been thinking sadly of his beautiful dead bride, but at those words from Oswald Ferris he turned his head and looked at him.