he original dusk of their being,
before light (and even electric light) had been carried into them for
the sake of better morality and--and--well--the greater profit, too.
It was at breakfast of the morning following our talk about Jim that he
mentioned the place, after I had quoted poor Brierly's remark: "Let him
creep twenty feet underground and stay there." He looked up at me with
interested attention, as though I had been a rare insect. "This could be
done, too," he remarked, sipping his coffee. "Bury him in some sort,"
I explained. "One doesn't like to do it of course, but it would be the
best thing, seeing what he is." "Yes; he is young," Stein mused. "The
youngest human being now in existence," I affirmed. "Schon. There's
Patusan," he went on in the same tone. . . . "And the woman is dead
now," he added incomprehensibly.

'Of course I don't know that story; I can only guess that once before
Patusan had been used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or
misfortune. It is impossible to suspect Stein. The only woman that
had ever existed for him was the Malay girl he called "My wife the
princess," or, more rarely, in moments of expansion, "the mother of my
Emma." Who was the woman he had mentioned in connection with Patusan I
can't say; but from his allusions I understand she had been an educated
and very good-looking Dutch-Malay girl, with a tragic or perhaps only a
pitiful history, whose most painful part no doubt was her marriage with
a Malacca Portuguese who had been clerk in some commercial house in
the Dutch colonies. I gathered from Stein that this man was an
unsatisfactory person in more ways than one, all being more or less
indefinite and offensive. It was solely for his wife's sake that Stein
had appointed him manager of Stein & Co.'s trading post in Patusan;
but commercially the arrangement was not a success, at any rate for
the firm, and now the woman had died, Stein was disposed to try another
agent there. The Portuguese, whose name was Cornelius, considered
himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities
to a better position. This man Jim would have to relieve. "But I don't
think he will go away from the place," remarked Stein. "That has nothing
to do with me. It was only for the sake of the woman that I . . . But as
I think there is a daughter left, I shall let him, if he likes to stay,
keep the old house."

'Patusan is a remote district of a native-ruled state, and the chie