a fevered memory. He saw
her in a luminous perspective of palatial drawing rooms, in the restless
eddy and flow of a human sea, at the foot of walls high as cliffs, under
lofty ceilings that like a tropical sky flung light and heat upon the
shallow glitter of uniforms, of stars, of diamonds, of eyes sparkling
in the weary or impassive faces of the throng at an official reception.
Outside he had found the unavoidable darkness with its aspect of patient
waiting, a cloudy sky holding back the dawn of a London morning. It was
difficult to believe.

Lingard, who had been looking dangerously fierce, slapped his thigh and
showed signs of agitation.

"By heavens, I had forgotten all about you!" he pronounced in dismay.

Mrs. Travers fixed her eyes on Immada. Fairhaired and white she asserted
herself before the girl of olive face and raven locks with the maturity
of perfection, with the superiority of the flower over the leaf, of the
phrase that contains a thought over the cry that can only express an
emotion. Immense spaces and countless centuries stretched between
them: and she looked at her as when one looks into one's own heart
with absorbed curiosity, with still wonder, with an immense compassion.
Lingard murmured, warningly:

"Don't touch her."

Mrs. Travers looked at him.

"Do you think I could hurt her?" she asked, softly, and was so startled
to hear him mutter a gloomy "Perhaps," that she hesitated before she
smiled.

"Almost a child! And so pretty! What a delicate face," she said, while
another deep sigh of the sea breeze lifted and let fall the screens, so
that the sound, the wind, and the glitter seemed to rush in together and
bear her words away into space. "I had no idea of anything so charmingly
gentle," she went on in a voice that without effort glowed, caressed,
and had a magic power of delight to the soul. "So young! And she lives
here--does she? On the sea--or where? Lives--" Then faintly, as if she
had been in the act of speaking, removed instantly to a great distance,
she was heard again: "How does she live?"

Lingard had hardly seen Edith Travers till then. He had seen no one
really but Mr. Travers. He looked and listened with something of the
stupor of a new sensation.

Then he made a distinct effort to collect his thoughts and said with a
remnant of anger:

"What have you got to do with her? She knows war. Do you know anything
about it? And hunger, too, and thirst, and unhappiness; things you