She walked on along the terrace. The moonlight intensified her ethereal aspect; and nothing could have been more emphatic than the contrast between her seeming fragility and his apparent strength. At a recollection she walked more and more slowly, her pace according with the faltering of her heart beats. But it was in an almost indifferent tone that she inquired: "You are really going back to Africa day after to-morrow?" "Yes, everything's settled." She paused, staring across the gardens, watching the slow withdrawal from that scene of its peculiar charm. "Why are you returning?" He hesitated. Well, he had reason to believe, he said, that not far north of the Zambesi there was an unmapped, ruined city similar to the stone city called Zimbabwe, which adventurers from Phoenicia were supposed to have built four thousand years ago, as a mining town of the fabled Land of Ophir. Who knew what ancient idols, what Himyarite inscriptions, what trinkets of gold, might not be found there? "How can such a matter be important enough to make you risk your life amid deadly fevers and insects, venomous reptiles, wild beasts and wilder men?" In that respect the expedition would be tame. The journey into the interior would consist of undramatic drudgeries and discomforts, of association with a primitive folk whom he had never failed to make his friends, of precautions that would confound the reptiles, the fevers, and the disease-bearing insects. As for the wild beasts, they asked nothing better than to be left alone. "Oh, yes," she assented, trailing her fan along the balustrade, "a hero must be modest on such points. Yet it seems to me an abnormal vanity that drives one into those places, just in order that one may say, 'It's I who have found a new pile of ruins, a few scraps of gold, in a jungle.'" After a moment's reflection, he confessed: "I gave you my secondary reason, because I thought you might find it more interesting than my chief one." It was true, he said, that he hoped to find a new Zimbabwe there; but his principal task would be to make a geological survey of some territory believed to be very rich in certain minerals. He was going for a group of capitalists who, if he brought back an encouraging report, would obtain large concessions for exploiting the land. It was a gamble; the territory in question was virtually unexplored. That region, moreover, was peopled by a tribe opposed to exploitation, and, for that matter, even to visits from their white-skinned nominal rulers. But he had always been successful in dealing with savages; so, since this was to be as much a diplomatic mission as a geological survey, he had seemed the one for the task. From this explanation she derived the idea that he was not a rich man, that perhaps until recently he had never thought of money as important, but that now, for some reason, he had determined that his fortune must be increased.