"I should not be the first woman who has visited them—Mrs.
Livingstone, for instance—"
"Do not speak of her. In three days she succumbed to fever on the banks of the Zambesi."
"I do not dispute it. But Lady Baker never left her husband, and Ida Pfeiffer twice travelled round the world. And have you no recollection of that charming young girl, the Countess Alexina Tinne, who, though scarcely twenty-three, had traversed the whole of Eastern Africa?"
"Ah!" said he, "do not cite her example. She is dead, as you know, a victim to Arabian butchery."
"Well," she replied, without a tremor in her voice, "if God so wills it, I will die as she did. I have often thought of her glorious death, and it has no terrors for me."
Hopeless of convincing her, he asked at last—
"When do you set out?"
"That I shall decide this very evening."
"With these other gentlemen?"
"Yes," she replied, casting down her eyes.