ithout guns?" After a significant glance down upon the slope
of the deck caused by the vessel being on the ground, he added with a
slight nod at Lingard--"And without knowledge?"

"You should not have come here, O Hassim," said Lingard, testily. "Here
no one understands. They take a rajah for a fisherman--"

"Ya-wa! A great mistake, for, truly, the chief of ten fugitives without
a country is much less than the headman of a fishing village," observed
Hassim, composedly. Immada sighed. "But you, Tuan, at least know the
truth," he went on with quiet irony; then after a pause--"We came here
because you had forgotten to look toward us, who had waited, sleeping
little at night, and in the day watching with hot eyes the empty water
at the foot of the sky for you."

Immada murmured, without lifting her head:

"You never looked for us. Never, never once."

"There was too much trouble in my eyes," explained Lingard with that
patient gentleness of tone and face which, every time he spoke to the
young girl, seemed to disengage itself from his whole person, enveloping
his fierceness, softening his aspect, such as the dreamy mist that in
the early radiance of the morning weaves a veil of tender charm about a
rugged rock in mid-ocean. "I must look now to the right and to the
left as in a time of sudden danger," he added after a moment and she
whispered an appalled "Why?" so low that its pain floated away in the
silence of attentive men, without response, unheard, ignored, like the
pain of an impalpable thought.

IV

D'Alcacer, standing back, surveyed them all with a profound and alert
attention. Lingard seemed unable to tear himself away from the yacht,
and remained, checked, as it were in the act of going, like a man who
has stopped to think out the last thing to say; and that stillness of a
body, forgotten by the labouring mind, reminded Carter of that moment
in the cabin, when alone he had seen this man thus wrestling with his
thought, motionless and locked in the grip of his conscience.

Mr. Travers muttered audibly through his teeth:

"How long is this performance going to last? I have desired you to go."

"Think of these poor devils," whispered Lingard, with a quick glance at
the crew huddled up near by.

"You are the kind of man I would be least disposed to trust--in any
case," said Mr. Travers, incisively, very low, and with an inexplicable
but very apparent satisfaction. "You are only wasting your time here."