One had been taken. That which seemed to Geoffrey Wornock inevitable in the history of African travel had been accomplished. The Dark Continent had claimed its tribute of human life. Africa had chosen her victim. Not the expected sacrifice. She had chosen her prey in him who had dared the worst she could do--not in one pilgrimage, but in long years of travel--who had looked her full in the face and laughed at her dangers, and had wooed her with a masterful spirit, telling her that she was fair, stepping with light, careless foot over her traps and pitfalls, lying down within sound of her lions, drenched with her torrential rains, tossed on her chopping seas, blinded with the fierce glare of her lightnings--always her lover, her master, her champion. "There is no land like Africa. There is nothing in life so good as the wild, free day of the wanderer," he had said again and again. And now he had paid for his love with his life. He had laid himself down, like Mark Antony at the foot of his dead mistress. He was gone, and the two young men were alone in the wide wilderness, among the mountain paths between the great lake and the far-off western sea; and in long pauses of melancholy silence by the camp-fire, or in the noontide rest, Geoffrey looked into the face that was like and yet not like his own, and thought of the woman they both loved, and of that duel to the death which there must needs be when two men have built all their hopes of happiness upon the love of one woman. A duel of deadly thoughts, if not of deadly weapons. "If we go back, it will be to fight for her love," he thought, "to fight as the wild stags in the mountains fight for the chosen hind--forehead to forehead, fore feet planted like iron, antlers locked, clashing with a sound that is heard afar off. Yes, we shall fight for her. The battle will have to begin again. We shall hate each other." Wakeful and unquiet in the deep, dead silence of the tropical night, he would sit outside hut or tent, mending the fire, looking listlessly at the circle of sleeping porters, listening mechanically for the qua-qua of the night-heron, or the grunt of the hippopotamus coming up from the river. The loss of Patrington's cheery companionship had wrought a dark change in Geoffrey's mind and feelings. While Patrington was with them, there had been ever-recurring distractions from sullen brooding on the inner self. Patrington was eminently a man of action, practical, matter-of-fact; and love-sick dreaming was hardly possible in his company. He was as energetic in conversation as in action, would argue, and philosophize, and quote his master of fiction, and dose them with Pickwick and Weller as he dosed them with quinine. He was gone; and in the deep melancholy that had fallen upon the travellers after the sudden shock of bereavement, Geoffrey's thoughts dwelt with a maddening iteration upon one absorbing theme.